


Some Words I Never Told You

by orphan_account



Series: Conflicts of Interest [3]
Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic-ish, Crying, Do I Ever Write Anything w/o Angst and Crying, Heartbreak, Minor Character Death, Murder for Hire, Rape, Season 19 Never Happened!, Slight Canon Divergence, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-13 00:39:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15352380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Another overly-complex case-fic-ish multi-chapter Barson story. The version of "Comeback" that I wanted to write before I knew how Season 19 would progress. Plot is similar to "Comeback" in Chapters 2 and 3, then changes focus so I don't bore you to death. :-)See the two oneshots in the series, "Conflicts" and "Interest" for backstory and minor points of canon divergence.





	1. Chapter 1

Claire Kincaid was a rising prosecutorial star, a Harvard Law graduate who aspired to be a constitutional scholar and a federal judge. By the time she was 31, only six years out of law school, she’d sat second chair on more than 100 cases prosecuted by EADAs Ben Stone and Jack McCoy, had prosecuted a handful of cases on her own, and was up for a promotion that would give her a full docket of cases and her own office upstairs: she was going to be the dedicated ADA for the Manhattan Special Victims Unit.

In early 1996, a horrendous season of snowstorm after snowstorm and Mayor Giuliani picking fights about works of art and ferrets, Kincaid, splitting her time between the EADA’s office and her new role, was assigned her first special victims case. The case involved a high school run by Hudson University where three teachers had been accused of raping ten students over a period of 15 years. Kincaid and the detectives on the case were certain that there were more victims, probably at least twenty.

Because of the statute of limitations, Kincaid was able to charge only one teacher on one count of rape. The detectives were looking for more victims. Payoffs, threats, and a murder-for-hire (of a teacher who’d threatened to expose his colleagues’ activities and the university’s cover-up) were unearthed. 

There were jurisdiction issues because the high school was in Brooklyn while Hudson was in Manhattan; most of the crimes had occurred at the Hudson dormitories in Manhattan, but some had happened right on the high school campus. To resolve this, they paired Kincaid up with Rafael Barba, who’d been working for the Brooklyn DA for only three months. 

She was annoyed at first that they paired her up with an ADA who’d graduated from law school less than two years ago, but was more approving as soon as they got to work. Kincaid told Barba that he was an excellent second chair, that he had a long career ahead of him. “With this case,” she said, “we’re going to make new law. We’re going to change the statutes of limitation in New York State. Nobody who was forced to keep silent as a kid will have to stay silent as an adult anymore. You’ll see.”

Kincaid was going to be a judge. Her plan was to apply for an appointment when she turned 35, give the city ten years on a criminal court bench, and then aim for a federal appointment. 

That was the Claire Kincaid who Barba had known, not the one who was the subject of a thousand whispered rumors after her funeral that spring. He knew the Kincaid who wanted to change New York’s laws on the statute of limitations for rape, to make the system more fair for people who’d been abused as children; he knew the Kincaid who’d mapped out her career path to federal judge. In the Manhattan and Brooklyn DAs offices, the ADAs and paralegals gossiped about her relationship with Jack McCoy. 

After Kincaid was killed by a drunk driver who’d slammed directly into the driver’s side of her car, sparing the detective in the passenger’s seat, their case against Hudson faltered. A judge ruled that the university couldn’t be held responsible, and they got one teacher on one count of rape for which he served four years in prison, and one administrator on murder-for-hire. The administrator was 80 and died before his sentencing hearing. 

When the Brooklyn DA created a dedicated position for an SVU ADA, Barba immediately put his name in. Years later, when the Manhattan position opened following Casey Novak’s resignation, he requested a lateral transfer. He wanted to do some of the work that Kincaid had aspired to, in her memory, in a sense. 

She’d told him that she could see him as a judge too, that there would be a spectacular Harvard Law contingent on the bench someday. 

—

Rafael Barba would never be a judge. 

He’d come close, gloriously close, after 10 hours in front of two grand juries and six weeks in appeals court fighting to take down Optimum Air. When the once-major airline had to declare bankruptcy only three months after Barba launched his attack, the employees and former employees who’d suffered for years under the watch of the company’s secretive boys’ club celebrated. Benson called him a “feminist icon.” McCoy reiterated that Barba reminded him of himself when he was younger. The mayor asked McCoy why Barba had never applied for a position on a criminal court bench.

On the day Optimum was bought out by another major airline, McCoy ceremoniously dropped an application for a judicial appointment on Barba’s desk.

Rita Calhoun told him that he should go for it, since the city judiciary was not allowed to look at his personal bank accounts, only his tax returns, when doing a background check. 

“Then they’ll turn me down because I’m responsible for the fall of Alex Muñoz,” he said. “It’s all political. Muñoz was a hero in the state senate.”

“So? Worst that happens, they’ll say no, you’ll stay in the ADAs office where you are.”

“Alex is on his apology tour. He’s making another run for state senate next year.”

“There you go. They’ll have their man back.”

“Sure.”

He submitted the application because his grandmother would have expected no less. 

When he found out that he was being considered for an appointment, Barba asked McCoy to keep it quiet. He didn’t tell anyone, not Lucia, who’d have expressed her joy but also her concern that they’d rake him over the coals for what he’d done to Alex, and not Liv, who’d have looked at him with pride shining in her eyes, _believing in him_ , still apparently oblivious to how she’d let him down (broken his heart, he wouldn’t say) by becoming romantically involved with the head of the IAB. 

If she hadn’t told him the night before his grandmother’s funeral, that night when his lips were on her lips, her face, her neck, her collarbone, If she hadn’t told him that there was too much of a conflict of interest for them to be together, and then promised him —

He stopped himself. He didn’t want to remember anymore. All he knew was that he didn’t want to see the pride in Olivia Benson’s eyes when he told her he was up for a judiciary appointment. 

Barba had accepted that pride during the Optimum case because they’d done that _together_ , made such a rock-solid case against the pilots and executives that no one could pull it out from under them.

This was different.

He knew. He was expecting the letdown. 

What he didn’t expect was to be blackmailed by a copycat killer who’d not only located Ashtonja Abreu, but also believed — or was ready to make it look like — Barba was paying her for sex. He ultimately had to tell Benson, and then McCoy, what had happened with Ashtonja’s mother. McCoy said that what happened next was up to the state bar association. 

He was lucky: he got a month’s suspension without pay, a reprimand, and he was no longer under consideration for a judgeship. In light of what he’d done, giving a drug-addicted witness a “loan” to ensure she’d appear on the stand — Calhoun said it too — they’d let him off easy. 

He thought about resigning. There were too many important cases on his desk, too many Optimum folks still in appeals court, for him to let them down. 

He spent the first three weeks of his month off traveling up and down the East Coast, visiting old Harvard friends. Benson called a few times, and he always made excuses for why he couldn’t see her. 

They’d been together more than a year, Benson and Tucker. They’d probably get married. 

Rafael Barba was too old for that sort of pining. A sad _cuarentón_ , his mother had once accusingly labeled him. 

_When are you back?_ Benson texted him on a Friday night.

 _Next Monday_ , he answered.

She didn’t respond for almost an hour. _You’re a good ADA. A great ADA. The best._

He wondered if she’d found out about the judiciary appointment. 

At least he didn’t have to worry about his ethical breach catching up to him anymore. At least he didn’t have to worry about being disbarred over the “loan” he’d given Ashtonja’s mother. 

He’d never be a judge. 

But that was all right.

He hadn’t been disbarred, and he still had his studio-apartment-sized office at Centre Street. He still had his job. 

By nine-thirty on Friday, he was on the couch in his T-shirt and boxers, very nearly dozing off from boredom and the few sips of scotch he’d taken from a tumbler set atop two books stacked on his coffee table. He was heading to DC on Monday, staying with more old friends for a few days to combat the boredom of the last leg of his suspension. 

But tonight, at nine-thirty on a Friday night, he was a sad _cuarentón_. 

He hadn’t been with anybody in more than two years. 

He shook his head, clearing from his mind the realization that his feelings for Benson had immobilized him. 

His landline rang. Since he’d moved into this apartment five years ago, only two people ever called the landline: his grandmother, gone more than two years now, and the doorman.

“There’s a Yelina Guzman here to see you,” the doorman said.

“Really?” Barba couldn’t help but ask. “Give me a minute.”

Yelina Muñoz had given the doorman her maiden name. 

“Rafi?” he heard Yelina say. The doorman must have passed her the phone, prompted by his “really.” 

“Come up,” he told her.

He pulled on a pair of jeans and opened the door when he heard the elevator down the hall. “You were getting ready for bed, Papi?” she asked, her tone almost dismissive.

“What do you think?” He raised an eyebrow. A million years after the fact, even though she’d been involved in her husband’s corruption scandal, he still couldn’t help flirting with her. 

Maybe it was the three sips of scotch talking. Maybe it was two years without anybody in his bed talking. He was a mess.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Water,” she said. “Please.”

In the kitchen, he filled a glass from the faucet. She took it, drank, set the glass down near the sink, and then threw her arms around him. He stumbled back, surprised by the gesture.

“I’m sorry, Papi, I’m so sorry, Alex told me you were up for an appointment to be a judge.”

He hadn’t spoken to Alex in almost three years, since he’d served only three months on a corruption charge related to his improper (very improper, very illegal) communications with a high school student. 

“Alex is still friends with everyone in the state senate, and with everybody on city council. Word got around.” She patted his arm. “I’m sorry. I know it was your dream.”

“What do you want?”

“I wanted to be your friend, I wanted to tell you —“

“Yelina, we haven’t been friends for a long time. If you’re here to offer me a seat on a criminal court bench in exchange for a favor for Alex, I’m picking up the phone and calling the governor.”

“Rafi.”

“I have no qualms about —“

She laid one hand on each of his arms, squaring his shoulders. “You trust me?”

“No,” he said plainly. 

“You’re probably right,” she said, taking her glass of water into the living room, where she sat on the sofa and patted the seat next to her. He sat with her.

“Last year, you were getting death threats, from Felipe Heredio. They never were able to figure out who hired him.”

Barba felt a chill run up through his legs, up into his spine and into his stomach. There was no reason Yelina should have known that name, no reason. “Alejandro?” he asked. 

“No,” she said, “me.”

He stood up and flew towards his front door. “Out,” he told her.

“Rafi, I came here to explain.”

“You wasted weeks of two detectives’ time, two detectives who were grieving over their colleague. How could you? Get out of my apartment, out of my life for good, you and Alex. I’m done.”

She stared to speak, but Barba cut in again. “How dare you.”

“He was up for more charges because of the —“

“Because of the 15-year-old? Is that why David Willard assumed I was paying Ashtonja Abreu for sex? Is it because he got what he used to blackmail me from you?”

“No,” she said, leaning against the front door, “no, I swear to God, Rafael, we had nothing to do with that.”

“You tried to have me killed!”

“No.” She shook her head and he noticed tears on her cheeks. “I swear, no.” 

Great. Was he supposed to comfort his former friend, the woman who’d hired Heredio to threaten him? 

“Alex was going to be brought up on more serious charges. You know you set all of that into motion. You could have weighed the costs and benefits of taking him down, but you didn’t, and most of the Bronx hates you now, I hope you know. You took away this city’s last chance at a mayor who works for the people, at a mayor who fights for equal housing and schools that are truly public.” 

“Is this a campaign speech?”

“We were scared. He was facing much more serious federal corruption charges. We did what we … we did what we do in these situations.”

“Yelina.”

“I know. Goodbye.”

“Why tell me now? You’d have gotten away with it.”

He saw her throat move up and down as she swallowed hard. “When I heard about how you lost your chance to be a judge, I just wanted — I wanted you to know that as much as you did Alex wrong, I did you wrong. After everything, you deserved to be a judge. I wanted to come clean in case …” She trailed off, biting the inside of her cheek instead of finishing the sentence.

Barba dipped his head to catch her eyes. “In case what?”

“Just … in case.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in danger?”

“No. No, of course not, Rafi, stop that.”

He wasn’t sure whether to believe her. She leaned in and kissed his cheek, lingering a bit too long before she walked out the door.

He’d never have guessed that the death threats had come from the Muñozes.

He’d loved Yelina, once.

Sitting back on the couch, staring into his unfinished scotch, Barba reminded himself that he still had his job, he still had the Optimum victory in his pocket. 

That was something. 

—-

When he returned to the courthouse the next week, Olivia Benson was waiting for him in the outside office, chatting with Carmen. “Don’t you have police work to do?” he asked.

Benson laughed. “Welcome back,” she said, handing him a small plastic box tied with a bow, which he eyed suspiciously. “Chocolate covered almonds. Had to grab something on the way. After what you’ve been through with Willard and the bar association, I knew not to show up without snacks.”

“All right, then.” He’d already opened the box and started eating. 

Inside his office, she held out her arms and wiggled her fingers as if trying to draw him into a hug.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate, considering our working relationship.” 

“Are you serious? Rafa,” she said, purposefully flattening her voice.

He sat at the edge of his desk, and she sat next to him, trying to catch his gaze. “Hey,” she prompted, placing a hand over his, “how’re you holding up?”

“Very well, now that I’m back at work and earning a salary again.”

“I know about criminal court. About the position you were up for.”

“How?”

“McCoy told me after a meeting. He was trying to make conversation. He caught himself right afterwards, said not to say anything to you because you had his word he wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“McCoy was EADA for over 20 years. He doesn’t slip up.”

“In any case, I’m sorry.”

“Liv,” he said, a hint of warning in his voice. She was running her fingertips lightly across his knuckles.

“You and I should talk. I feel like we haven’t _talked_ in a year.”

“Liv,” he warned again.

“You understand, right, that before we knew that Tucker had any connection to St. Fabiola’s, before he was framed, there was no significant conflict of interest as long as we disclosed? Our mistake was not disclosing earlier. I’m sorry if you’re still angry that we almost screwed up your case.”

“Are you being deliberately obtuse?” he couldn’t help asking.

“What do you — for God’s sake, Rafa, were you jealous? Have you been stewing in your own jealousy for more than a year? I thought it was clear that our” — she pointed to herself, then to him, then back to herself, a lighting-fast gesture to indicate the thing she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say — “would have brought hundreds of SVU cases into question. Neither of us is selfish enough to risk that.”

She leaned back, staring at him for a moment. “Don’t tell me,” she said, “don’t tell me that all of this has been about —“

“No. It hasn’t. Olivia, if you want for our friendship to continue, don’t broach the topic again.”

“Okay.” She stood in front of him, where he was still sitting on the desk. “I almost put in for retirement last month.”

“What?” _They were supposed to be squabbling when they were 85_ , he tried not to remember. 

“I thought about retiring with Ed, but I can’t leave my post. Not now. There’s too much work to be done. Maybe a few years down the line, but NYPD looks at the big picture, CompStat, and SVU needs people who’ll advocate for individual victims.”

“To make sure the law works for them,” Barba said, remembering something else. Someone else: his brief onetime mentor, Claire Kincaid. Maybe Benson was right: maybe it would be incredibly selfish for them to risk hundreds of cases being thrown out on technicalities, on conflicts of interest. 

“He wanted me to retire with him, for us to get married and move somewhere quiet with Noah, and he was very insistent, very determined, but I’m not ready to retire. I couldn’t imagine a lifetime of quiet with him.”

“Hm.”

“You’ll be a judge someday,” she said. “In my heart, I know it.”

“I won’t. The bar association has already decided that.”

“Well, then,” she said, an ever-so-slight break in her voice, “whatever the bar association says, you _deserved _to be a judge.”__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The breaks from canon here: (1) the events of S19's "Flight Risk" take place in S18, (2) "Know It All" happens at the end of S18.
> 
> (The Giuliani-vs-ferret fight mentioned in passing happened in 1999 not 1996, but I couldn't help throwing that into a NYC-in-the-90s flashback, please forgive me.)
> 
> I did the cheeseball thing and lifted the title from a song lyric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THqt4cPHlqo


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s some overlap between Chapters 2 and 3 of this story and “Comeback,” because this was the version of “Comeback” I wanted to write last winter before The Undiscovered Country aired. The storyline changes focus after Chapter 3. Thank you for reading :-)

Belinda Cowan, an ADA who worked on homicide cases one floor above Barba at the courthouse on Centre Street, showed up in Barba’s office on a Friday morning in September, her bruised face barely concealed by a scarf. Cowan immediately became dizzy and had to lie down on the couch. She begged Barba not to call an ambulance until she explained, and sufficiently resolved, why there was a dead man in her apartment. 

Barba rolled up his sleeves and sat with her.

Cowan had been followed home by a 55(or so)-year-old drunk who she’d rejected in a bar; he’d pushed her into her apartment, overpowered and raped her. Before he left, he cleaned up, methodically — too methodically, she suspected — and then his eyes caught something on her kitchen table. He flew into a rage, beat her bloody, pointed a gun at her head, and was going to — she didn’t know why she remembered this, if he’d told her or if she’d figured it out herself — stage a suicide. Finding a last bout of strength, she struggled with him and shot him in the chest with his own gun. 

“I need you to call Olivia Benson,” Cowan said. “I need you to tell her to send her squad to my apartment. They need to be the ones to handle this.”

By the time Barba got off the phone with Benson, who radioed for paramedics to come to the courthouse, Cowan was unconscious.

“I was respecting her wishes,” Barba explained to Benson later that morning, when Cowan was in emergency surgery at Mercy Hospital and they were back in Barba’s office. The surgeons were trying to control the bleeding, and an ER doctor told Benson that Cowan should have been at the hospital at least 6 hours earlier. 

“You should have called a bus right away. You’re a smart man, Rafa. This was excessively dumb on your part.”

“Belinda said that she didn’t want to risk being charged with murder. Her best bet was to get SVU on the scene — she specifically said “I need you to call Olivia Benson” — to investigate.”

“Her best bet was to go right to a hospital.”

“Not with Jack McCoy as DA.”

“Seriously?”

“You saw what he did last year with that ADA who interfered in a family’s right-to-die case. The guy was wrong, sure, completely out of bounds, but McCoy charged him with murder. Not even manslaughter. He brought in a special prosecutor and charged the guy with murder, put him through hell with a trial. We haven’t heard from him since. I’m sure that’s what was on Belinda’s mind.”

“You should have called a bus.”

“Uncle Jack likes to file charges against his own employees when the Ledger embarrasses him.”

“What a way to talk about your boss,” Benson said, yanking her buzzing phone out of her pocket. “Amanda?” she said into the phone. “I’m here with Barba. Can I put you on speaker?”

“We’ve got a small problem,” Rollins said.

“How small?” Benson asked. Barba had already thrown his head back in exasperation.

“This is still the most obvious case of self-defense we’ve ever seen. Carisi and I have got pictures, CSU’s on everything else, we’ve got everything you need. We think —“

“What’s the problem?” Barba snapped.

“Counselor, she said that he saw something on the kitchen table and flew into a rage, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“We think it was her paycheck.”

“From the DA’s office.”

“Bingo,” Rollins said. “So here’s what’s up: our “vic” had more than 40 different forms of ID in his wallet. Different names. Different states. We have no idea who this guy is.”

“Great.” 

“Carisi bagged up the wallet. He’s going to register it as evidence and then start looking through the IDs.”

“Wrap it up quickly, though,” Benson said. “I don’t want ADA Cowan charged.”

“Other than the ID thing, all I see here is clear-cut self-defense.”

After Benson took Rollins off speaker and finished their conversation, she turned back to Barba. “I hope ADA Cowan pulls through,” she said.

“She knew what — she _knows_ what she’s doing. She’s in criminal court every day.”

Benson shrugged, then half-heartedly offered Barba a light punch to the upper arm. “Keep me up to date, if you hear about her condition first.”

“I will.”

“Are you going up to see McCoy?”

“I’ll call upstairs and find out if he’s in. I can tell him your people think it’s self-defense?”

“Preliminary conclusion. But, yes, tell him it looks like self-defense.”

After Benson left, Barba called McCoy’s assistant, explained what happened with Cowan, and then headed up to see the DA.

“How’s she doing?” McCoy asked when Barba gave him a more complete version of the story.

“Last I heard, she was still in surgery.”

McCoy shook his head. “A tragedy.”

“I’m here on Belinda’s behalf. The reason she waited so long to go to the hospital was that she was afraid she’d be charged with murder if she didn’t get SVU to her apartment first.”

“Murder. Rafael, what do you think of me?”

Almost 21 years ago, he was working on the Hudson case two to three days a week with Claire Kincaid. He would not say out loud what he “thought of” Jack McCoy.

“The governor and I have been on the outs since the trial last year. He felt that I let politics and the New York Ledger overwhelm me. If that’s what was in the back of Belinda’s mind, I’m …”

“You’re sorry,” Barba said matter-of-factly.

“If SVU says self-defense, I will not charge Belinda.”

“Even if the Ledger accuses you of doing a favor for your employee, of covering up for her?”

“Then the Ledger would be wrong.”

—-

Benson heard from Cowan’s sister later in the day: she was out of surgery but still in ICU, and it would most likely be a few days before she’d be able to talk to the detectives. Walking back out into the squadroom, she saw her entire senior staff — Rollins, Carisi, and Fin — huddled up near a conference table, poring over a pile of drivers’ licenses. An electronic map was projected onto a screen behind them. 

“Wrap it up,” Benson said. “McCoy gave Barba his word that when he gets our full report, he won’t press charges against Cowan.”

“We’ve got a gold mine here,” Carisi said.

Fin pointed to the map. “52 drivers’ licenses from 37 states. So far eight of them match sexual assault and rape arrests across the country. Our dead guy’s a serial. He’s only served a few months here and there.”

“Eight different cases, and the fingerprints didn’t match in CODIS?”

“He’s hardcore,” Rollins said. “Probably alters his fingerprints every year. Two of the arrests were here in Manhattan, so we need to ask Warner for this guy’s DNA. It might be a match for some of our unsolved rapes.”

Benson nodded. “Call Barba, too. Find out why this guy’s been able to appear in court under so many different aliases. Any other crimes coming up?”

“We didn’t run all the IDs yet. We’re only halfway there,” Rollins told her. “We’ll let you know.”

By 4pm, the detectives had three more hits on the dead man’s drivers’ licenses: DUIs in Texas, Connecticut, and Virginia, one of which involved a death for which he’d served only three months for manslaughter. Barba planned to hand-deliver to Rollins the information she’d requested, since he wanted to see for himself what Cowan’s rapist had gotten away with over ten, maybe twenty years. 

Fin came in to Benson’s office and approached her desk. “Barba’s on his way?” he asked.

“There’s not much he can do, but he’s getting us copies of the court records from the two arraignments here in Manhattan. One was dismissed, which means —“

“Liv. Listen to me. Something just came over the communication network that you’re going to want to hear about.”

“What happened?” she asked, echoing the concern in Fin’s voice.

“This morning they found a couple of floaters in the East River. They’d been in there at least three, four days so it took a while to ID them. It was former state senator Alex Muñoz and his wife.”

Benson pressed a hand to her heart. “Do you think Barba knows yet?”

“It’ll probably be on the news, on the Web, in an hour or so. NYPD won’t release the information until the families are notified.”

“Right.” She rubbed her eyes, realizing that she was going to have to be the one to break the news to Barba.

“It’s none of my business, but it’s probably better he hears it from you.”

“Right,” she said again.

Barba showed up in Benson’s office a few minutes later. His expression softened when he saw her face. He closed the door behind him. 

“Rafa,” she said, “sit down.” 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, not sitting down.

She stood instead, taking one of his hands in hers. With more than twenty years’ experience breaking horrific news to victims’ families and friends, she knew how to do this: “NYPD just told us that Alex and Yelina Muñoz were found dead this morning.” No hedging, no extra details, no preface.

Barba blinked furiously. “What?”

“They were found in the East River this morning.” She tried to lock eyes with him, but he wouldn’t let her. “It came over our communication network a few minutes ago. They’d been missing for a few days.”

He blinked a few more times and composed himself. “They must have been in deep shit with this new campaign.”

“Rafa, I’m so sorry.”

“NYPD is sure it was them?”

“Yes.”

“This can’t be.”

“I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry.” That’s how it came out. She didn’t self-correct, so as not to call attention to the slip-up, but they were friends, weren’t they, so what did it matter? She saw Barba shiver. “What can I do?”

“Nothing. What’s there to do now? He was a corrupt, lecherous asshole who looked out for me and made sure I survived as a kid, he was one of my closest friends for a long time, one of few people I trusted — isn’t that funny — probably the reason I went to law school, but — but.” He couldn’t finish. He pressed his lips together and swallowed hard. There were no tears in his eyes. 

Benson hugged him and didn’t let go. “I can’t — it doesn’t seem real,” he said into her shoulder. 

“I know. I’m here if you need me. Do you want to come for dinner tonight?”

“I have to talk to my mother, and Eddie, and — do you know who’s handling the investigation?”

“Not yet. We just heard about the floa — we just got the news ourselves.”

“You were going to say “about the floaters,” he said breathlessly, “you called them “floaters”.”

“Force of habit. Are you sure —“

“When you find out who the lead detective is, would you tell them to get in touch with me? I have some information that may be of use.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not relevant to SVU.”

Barba’s phone buzzed inside his suit jacket, playing a soft melody beneath the loud vibration. He backed away from Benson and removed the phone from an inside pocket. “Eddie,” he said, looking at the screen.

“You’re not going to take it?”

“Not now,” he said. “I have nothing to say.”

The phone vibrated again. “A friend of my mother’s,” he told Benson. “Most certainly calling to tell me that I got Alex and Yelina killed. Her friends already all say it was me, not Alex’s proclivity for sexting women who weren’t his wife and using his political power to cover up his indiscretions, that crushed his mayoral campaign.” Another call. “And there’s Mami now. I’m — I’m going to head up there tonight, see what I can do, see if the girls are all right.”

“Okay.”

“No,” Barba said, correcting himself, “of course they’re not all right, and of course Alex and Yelina’s friends will be outraged if I show up. But still.” 

“I know.”

Barba headed for the door. “Thank you for telling me. Better this way than through my news alerts, I suppose.” With his hand on the doorknob, he hunched over suddenly and clenched his teeth. “I could have stopped this. She came to me, Yelina, a few months ago, she came to me to confess that she was the one who hired Heredio to threaten me. Had nothing to do with Munson, nothing to do with the C.O.s. The Muñozes call in death threats against people who do them wrong. Alex was going to face more corruption charges because of the snowball I started rolling down the hill, so they called in threats against me.”

“Come here, come here,” Benson said, taking his arm and leading him to the couch. “Sit with me. Breathe. It’s okay.”

He sucked in a breath and exhaled through his nose. “I think they must have called in threats against the wrong person. Yelina was scared, Liv, she was scared, she said she told me about Heredio “just in case.” _Just in case what?_ I asked her, and she wouldn’t say. She was scared.”

“Rafa,” she said, taking his hand again and pressing their foreheads together. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about that now. There’s nothing you could have done. I will find out who the lead detective is on the case and put you in touch with him or her.”

Barba squeezed his eyes shut. “Thank you,” he said, choking on the two short words.

“I’m here,” she said, “always.”

“Are you,” he said, not quite a question, certainly not an answer. 

—-

He called his mother on his way out of the precinct. She said that none of this would have happened if Alex had been able to keep it in his pants and Rafael hadn’t insisted on wrecking his campaign days before the election. “If he was the mayor, all the scandals would have come out, but he’d still be alive.”

“Should I come up?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, Raf, I didn’t mean for that to sound so … so cruel.”

“We are all upset, to say the least.”

“Don’t come up. I mean this for your own sake: there’s a lot of people who — I won’t say it, you have enough on your mind.”

“Sure.” He looked up at the sky, already tinted red and orange so early in the fall, and smiled weakly. 

He didn’t cry until the next morning, when he was in the shower, when the reality of the Muñozes’ deaths, and the reality of the last few months, the last two years, hit him hard.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of overlap with “Comeback” in this chapter, but added a few bonuses in the last section. ;-) 
> 
> Vocabulary note for non-North American readers: by “pants” I mean trousers, not underpants, which you’ll probably get from the context anyway, but still, just in case … 
> 
> Important piece of writing advice: ALWAYS KEEP TRACK OF WHETHER OR NOT YOUR CHARACTERS ARE WEARING PANTS. Or clothing in general, for that matter.

On Saturday afternoon, Barba met with Captain Alexandra Eames at 1 Police Plaza. Captain Eames was the head of a joint federal-city task force investigating the Muñoz murders; she knew Benson, who she’d worked with when she’d headed up a similar task force for the Department of Homeland Security. Eames had set up the meeting the night before. 

Barba told her that Yelina had visited him in early June, when she’d admitted to hiring Heredio and had seemed worried — frightened, even — about something that she wouldn’t share with him. Eames asked him if he’d be willing to testify at a hearing or trial.

“Willing, sure,” Barba said, “but everything I told you is inadmissible.”

“Let my team’s lawyers worry about that,” Eames said. “We need you to corroborate that the Muñozes had a history of calling in death threats against people who they believed would take down the state senator’s political career.”

“You think that someone took the death threats seriously and retaliated?”

“It’s an open investigation. You’re a family friend. I can’t say.”

She told him, however, what they believed had happened, based on preliminary reports from the medical examiner, several of the Muñozes’ associates, and a couple of incidental witnesses: Alex and Yelina had been lured out to the Bronx in the middle of the in order to pay off a 16-year-old who Alex had been accused of sexting, so as to avoid a new scandal and new charges before his campaign to return to the state senate got off the ground. As they drove over the Third Avenue Bridge, one of the few bridges in the city that had no cameras set up, and no tolls, they were run off the road, likely by an SUV. When they got out of the car, the SUV rammed into them, creating only a small dent in the railing on the bridge, but breaking bones and sending the Muñozes into the Harlem River. 

It was bold. There was no weapon to trace, no camera in sight until the Major Deegan Expressway.

“That’s a hit job,” Barba said, trying not to think about how the Muñozes had probably died terrified, drowning with broken bones. He wished Eames, or anybody on the case, had known Alex and Yelina when they were younger. He wished they could understand why so many former friends and community leaders were legitimately mad at Barba after the events of October 2013.

—-

“Hey, Lieu, I’ve got something I need you to check out.” At 8AM on Monday, Carisi was a bundle of nerves, which meant that he’d been working all night. He’d worked a lot of overnight shifts to close cases ever since he was nearly shot in the head by a suspect; Benson worried about him. “Wanted you to see this because we might have to call in the Feds.”

Carisi led Benson to the conference table, where the map they’d put up the day after Cowan was attacked was still on the screen, a map of the United States with even more electronic thumbtacks than they’d had up on Friday. Benson dropped her oversized purse on a chair and squinted at the map. 

“Lit up like a Christmas tree,” Carisi said. “Like a, uh, Christmas tree full of thumbtacks.”

“These are all rapes?”

“No. That’s the thing. We didn’t find any more than the eight we found on Friday. The red ones are the rapes — these two are in Manhattan, I’m sure we’ll see more as soon as we get the DNA back — the rest are car crashes.”

“Car crashes? That’s definitely not our department.”

“Ten car crashes, ten different names, ten different drivers’ licenses. Half of them are DUIs. He served 3 months for one, 6 months for another, and just two years ago, he was fined in Wyoming for running a guy off the road into a lake, supposedly for driving without his glasses.”

“He must be —“

“Rollins is looking into whether somebody can fake a high blood alcohol level. ADA Cowan killed the most sophisticated hitman I’ve ever heard of. Well, not so sophisticated himself, but his methods.”

“I’ll call 1PP as soon as I’ve had the chance to talk to to Cowan, to get an official statement from her.”

“I’ll cross-check IDs with birth records, see if we can get some handle on who this guy is. I’m telling you, by the time this is over, a whole lot of unsolved rapes and murders-for-hire are going to be closed.” 

“Let’s hope so,” Benson said.

—

By the end of the week, Alex and Yelina’s bodies had been in the Medical Examiner’s office for so long that there was no use in having a wake, and the families just wanted to get the burial over with, so they held a funeral in the chapel of the cemetery in Westchester where Alex’s parents were buried, late on a Friday afternoon. When Barba walked into the chapel with his mother, Yelina’s sisters, standing near the front pews, glanced over at him and then turned to two other women they were with.

The women came up to him and were soon joined by a few other friends of the Muñozes. “We are all grieving,” one of Yelina’s sisters’ friends said in Spanish, talking through her teeth so as not to create a scene at a funeral, “so I won’t call you out for being stupid enough to show your face here. For the family’s sake, please leave.”

Barba nodded. 

“Mrs. Barba is welcome to stay,” she added. 

Lucia was the one who had predicted, hoped, many years earlier that Alex Muñoz would be the mayor of New York City before he turned 50. 

“You can get home all right?” Barba asked his mother. 

“Yes,” she assured him, and she stayed. 

By the time he walked two miles in designer shoes to the Metro-North station, stopping halfway for coffee and Excedrin, he had just missed the next southbound train, by only three minutes. 

An hour later, ten minutes before the next train was scheduled to arrive, Eddie Garcia joined him at the station. 

He laid an open hand on Barba’s back, over the dark trench coat that covered the black suit he often wore when conferencing with defense attorneys. “Sorry about what happened back there,” Eddie said. “Didn’t want to upset the family even if they’re wrong about you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“We’re heading to a bar to raise a couple hundred glasses to our friends. It’s only the family who didn’t want you there. The rest of them, they know it wasn’t you who got them in trouble.” 

“I’m the reason he’s not the mayor. Several community leaders have pointed that out to me over the years.”

“I’m responsible too.”

“For covering for him?”

“For not covering for him.”

“You did the right thing, Eddie.”

“Then so did you. Are you coming with us or not?”

He went with Eddie. By 11, after a few too many drinks, he managed to use a rideshare app to get a car to him, but he put in the wrong address: the address he put in was for Olivia Benson’s building. Shivering in the chilly early-October air (had it really been almost four years since he’d sent Alex’s campaign crashing to the ground?), he wondered what it meant, the degree to which he’d hit rock-bottom, to be dizzy and nauseated with drunkenness outside the building of the woman who feared the whole world would be destroyed if they ever got together romantically. 

Not the whole world. The Manhattan DAs office, maybe. A whole lot of sexual assault cases. Yes, yes, she was right, she’d always been right, neither of them was selfish enough to let the courts overturn hundreds of cases just so they could declare their love for — just so they could sleep together — fuck — make love all night — go on vacations together — be a — that was ridiculous, stupid — by the time he called Benson, solely because he needed her bathroom, that was the only reason for sure, he had no idea what his brain was doing. 

“Hi,” he said too brightly.

“It’s 11 at night. Hi.”

“Have you ever been kicked out of a funeral? I have. Some of the Jerome Avenue guys invited me to raise a couple of glasses to Alejandro, though, so it’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside your building. I gave the driver your address. I hope that won’t be a problem for the internal affairs bureau.”

On the other end, he heard Benson groan and could have sworn she muttered “asshole,” which the less-drunk sectors of his brain knew he deserved.

“Stand under the camera in my lobby. I’ll buzz you up.”

A wave of nausea hit him in the gut, then the throat. “Rafa?” he heard her say. 

He threw up in the gutter, over a sewer drain. For a few seconds, the ground spun out under him and then righted itself as waves of pain hit him behind the eyes. “Liv,” he said breathlessly into the phone, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have —“

“Did you throw up in my lobby?”

“No, in a sewer drain.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a subway grate?”

He panicked. “Let me check.”

“Come upstairs.”

“It’s a sewer.”

“Good. Come upstairs.”

Within a few minutes, he was stumbling out of the elevator towards Benson’s apartment, where she stood outside her door. She let him inside. He threw his trenchcoat, suit jacket, and tie over the kitchen counter. 

With a sigh, she hugged him. “They kicked you out of the funeral, really?”

“Hmm,” he said into her shoulder. _Completely rational from Alex and Yelina’s family’s points of view_ , the slightly-sober part of his brain said, _they wanted to protect the family’s feelings._

“You smell like vomit,” she said.

“Vómito y tristeza, como un triste cuarentón, cariño.” He sobered up a bit more when she looked at him sideways. “Darling. Like in the theater in the old days, when they called everybody “darling” because they couldn’t remember anybody’s name.” 

“You forgot my name?”

“I could _never_ forget your name, Olivia.”

She removed a pillow and blanket from the hall closet and tossed them on the couch, then went into the kitchen to get him a glass of water. “Drink,” she said, handing him the glass after he sunk into the couch. She sat next to him, which reminded him of the night before his grandmother’s funeral, when he promised her he’d make her say his name loud and slow. 

Two images, two thoughts, that didn’t sit well together: abuelita’s funeral and making out with Olivia Benson on her couch. 

“Try to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Thank you, Liv.”

He woke up two hours later, the clock on the cable box reading _1-:-0-something_ , his head pounding along with his heartbeat, ears ringing, and dashed into Benson’s bathroom to throw up again, praying to whoever the patron saint of don’t-confuse-the-kid-in-the-next-room was that he didn’t wake up Noah. 

Benson met him in the kitchen, where he was drinking a second glass of water. 

“I’m far too old for this,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake up Noah.”

“I checked on him. He’s sleeping.”

“Liv, I’m sorry. I don’t know what possessed me to show up at your place so late at night.”

“Don’t apologize. After these last few months, these last few days, don’t apologize.” She reached out to touch his arm, to play with the hem of his undershirt sleeve. “Here’s a bad idea: sleep off the rest of your hangover in my bed.” 

“As much as —“

“You’re already having a conversation with me while not wearing pants. Rafa, a line has been crossed.”

For the first time in weeks, he laughed. “I’ll put on pants and come to bed.”

“A line has been crossed,” she repeated.

He climbed into bed with her, in only a T-shirt and boxers, suddenly too old and too sad to worry about how improprietous their situation would look to anyone who didn’t know them. As soon as he was able to lie on his side, in a real bed, the pain that reached from his scalp to the space behind his eyes started to subside. 

Maybe it was the bed. Maybe it was her. 

But he was not selfish enough to send a stampede of defense attorneys after the DA, demanding new appeals, demanding overturned verdicts on account of a romantic relationship. 

In whispers, he told Benson what Eames had said about the Muñozes’ deaths, how they’d been run off the road, how they didn’t stand a chance. He caught himself crying. 

With tears still behind his eyelids, with Benson holding his hand but keeping an acceptable distance (despite the already-crossing-a-line intimacy of the situation), he fell asleep.


	4. Chapter 4

“Oh my God.”

At five in the morning, the sun wasn’t up yet but the birds of Manhattan were chirping like 90s-era car alarms (an unfortunate evolutionary mis-adaptation). “Liv?” Barba asked, neither willing nor able to open his eyes or move his body, which fortunately hadn’t betrayed him in any sense while he slept. Thank goodness for the effects of whiskey. 

In this context, at least. 

He felt the mattress rise and fall, and then a bright, concentrated light punched him in the forehead. He blinked his eyes open to find Benson sitting cross-legged next to him, tapping on a tablet. “Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you fighting crime?” he grumbled, closing one eye to block out the light from the screen. 

“Actually.”

“You’re working.” 

“Yes,” she said. “Go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“You said, “oh my God.” Listen, Liv, you saying _oh my God_ while you’re with me in bed has long been on my bucket list, but —“ He realized what he was saying. “I’m hungover. I’m awful.”

“What were you going to say?” she prompted. 

“That I’m not crossing it off my bucket list on a technicality.”

A wide smile spread across her face, but she didn’t look up from her tablet. “You should see if the Attorney General has any positions open in the city.”

“Nothing south of Syracuse at the moment.”

“Oh.” She smiled again, this time more muted. “You’ve checked.”

“And I’m on the bar association’s shitlist until I can manage a few more years without doing anything stupid, without paying any more witnesses to show up in court. You want to tell me why you’re working at — what time is it?”

“Five,” she said. “And I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Pillow talk.”

“Mmph.” He rolled over so he wasn’t facing her, then shut his eyes again.

“So, Syracuse, that’s a long way from Manhattan, isn’t it?”

Barba laughed. His face hurt from the night before, but Benson next to him, joking about him taking a job 250 miles away so they could be together, took the edge off his aches and pains. 

She left a kiss on his shoulder blade. He shivered, surprised by the gesture. “How are you?” she asked, rubbing his arm. 

“A mess,” he said, rolling onto his back. She’d set the tablet on the nightstand. 

“You stink,” she whispered.

“I’ve been told.”

“I mean you smell like vomit and scotch.”

_Vómito y tristeza_ , he remembered from the night before.

“I’ve got extra toothbrushes under the sink,” she continued, “and you’re welcome to take a shower as soon as you’re feeling up to it. As much as I know I should, I could never kick you out of bed.” 

“Liv,” he warned. 

She was studying his eyes, his forehead, his lips, a look of lovely concentration mixed with a dash of worry, maybe regret. He’d have loved for her to never kick him out of bed, but they had to wait until there was no longer a conflict of interest. 

They had to wait. That’s what they’d told each other last time, before Benson and Tucker got together. Before her not-quite-hypocrisy broke his heart. 

“I’ll take a shower, but afterwards I’m going to have to put on the clothes I was wearing last night. I’ll still stink.”

“Let me see if I have — no, no, wait, that’s terrible.”

“If you have any men’s clothes in your apartment?” He smirked when he turned to look at her. “Is that what you were going to say?”

“I might have a few T-shirts. You were —“

“Jealous. Yes. Of course I was jealous.” He was in bed with Olivia Benson, hungover after being kicked out of his former friends’ funeral, having cried every morning for the last six days as waves of grief washed over him in the shower. Alex and Yelina had no second chance, no shot at redemption because they weren’t coming back. _The Honorable Rafael Barba_ was a bust, a dream he could no longer clutch at for comfort. There was no reason for him not to lay all his cards on the table now, at least with Benson. “All the reasons you gave me for why we couldn’t be together —“

“Rafa.” He was taken aback when she snuggled up next to him, resting her head near his collarbone, her scalp beneath his chin. She was comforting him without having to smell his breath. He reached out to run a hand up and down her arm, knowing not to get too comfortable. “There’s a washer-dryer in the hall closet as you head towards the bathroom. It’s one of the reasons Cassidy and I chose this place years ago.”

“I can’t throw a suit in a washing machine.”

“I mean your underwear and shirt.”

“The shirt is dry-clean only.”

“One round in a washing machine isn’t going to kill it.”

“My dress shirts don’t belong in washing machines,” he insisted.

“All right. I can throw the underwear in with whatever’s in my hamper while you shower, then you can wait in here until —“

“Naked?”

“Do you want to wear one of my bathrobes? I’ll lend you a bathrobe.”

“You’re killing me here, Liv.”

He felt her laugh so hard that her ribs vibrated. “We’ve got to find something for you to wear,” she said. “You need to eat breakfast or that hangover will be what kills you.” 

She continued to laugh, quietly. “What’s so funny about that?” he asked.

“I’m picturing Noah telling Rollins that you stayed over because you were sick, and ate breakfast with us while wearing my bathrobe.”

“Dear God.”

“Amanda will say she got her birthday and Christmas presents at the same time.”

“How about I take a shower, borrow one of those godforsaken T-shirts, and see if you have a pair of sweatpants that’ll fit me until I get my underwear out of the wash?”

Now they were both cracking up, trying to suppress peals of laughter so they wouldn’t wake up Noah, as they discussed the logistics of getting Barba home showered and in clean underwear. “You realize this means —“ he started to say.

“You’ll have made me say “oh my God” in bed on a technicality, and you’ll have “gotten into my pants” on a technicality. Poor you.”

“I mean, if a job with the Attorney General were to come up right now, you could —“

“Creep.”

“Always.” He lifted her arm and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For making me laugh.”

“How are you doing, really?” she asked.

“Is “full of regret” too pathetic an answer?” 

“Given the circumstances, no.” She kissed his cheek. One too many kisses: they were too close to hundreds of cases being overturned to continue. They were not selfish enough to move forward. “You could work as a defense attorney,” she suggested. 

“Never.”

“Never?”

“I’ve been on the prosecutorial side of things for more than 20 years.”

“So you wouldn’t join, say, Rita Calhoun’s firm, even if it meant you and I could — be something, be together — without an entire NYPD department collapsing?”

Barba sat up, struggling to keep his own head balanced. “There are reasons I’ve stayed on the prosecutorial side of things for 20 years.”

“Reasons,” she echoed, a teasing tone in her voice. “What’s their name?”

“Don’t be so dismissive. It has nothing to do with a romantic relationship.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t —“

“Claire Kincaid, my first mentor in the DAs office. She was assistant to the EADA, transitioning into the position I’m in now. We were working together on a cross-jurisdictional case when she was killed by a drunk driver.”

“I’ve heard about her, from Alex Cabot.”

“It took the DAs office more than three years to fill that position.”

“That’s why we had no dedicated ADA during my first few years with SVU.”

“Right.”

Benson rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger so hard that she must have seen stars. Barba slid over a few centimeters and, hesitating for a moment, half-embraced her, placing his hands on her upper arms. “What is it? Liv, tell me, please. We shared a bed last night and I”m about to use your shower while you wash my underwear.”

“Which makes it pillow talk.” She leaned into a fuller embrace, her head heavy on his shoulder. “If you really need to know, Carisi linked the man who raped ADA Cowan to eight other rapes — there’ll be more when we get DNA — and also what look like hit jobs, murders for hire. The feds are reopening some DUI cases where high-profile cases were killed, where somebody might have hired a hitman, as in murders for hire.”

“What you’re thinking, that can’t be.” Barba wrinkled his forehead, reflexively drawing Benson closer. “The driver was tried, convicted, and served 12 months. They didn’t do DNA testing back then, but he would have been printed and his priors would have been run.”

“Our perp, whoever this guy is, served a few sentences, usually 3 to 6 months, here and there. He knew how to fake a high BAC. Changed identities, changed fingerprints, moved from state to state. Rollins has a masters’ in forensics and has never heard of anything like this.”

Barba kissed the top of Benson’s head and let his arms slide away gently, so they were sitting apart again. “Your “oh my God” before, that was because of the Muñozes, wasn’t it?”

“I can’t say.”

“Off the record.”

“What record?” Benson lifted the covers, stood up and walked over to her dresser. “There’s evidence that because of DNA testing and changes in how BAC is run, the perp changed his methods in the last ten years or so. Okay? This is what I was afraid of. It had already happened with two of my exes, and then, all my worst fears came true with the St. Fabiola’s case. Here we are heading down that same road.” She hung her head and gritted her teeth in frustration. “Every time. Every single time.”

“No, no, no,” Barba said, practically leaping out of bed to go to her, forgetting his hangover symptoms to the point that he had to lay his palms flat on the dresser when his headache and dizziness returned with a vengeance. “We are not heading down that same road. Look at me. We decided almost three years ago that we’d jeopardize our careers and the DA’s office if we ever went further than … well, this.”

“Rafa,” she said, her voice cracking a bit, “that broke your heart. I broke your heart.”

“Please. Hearts are cheap. I’ll get another one. Let Alex and Yelina, and Claire, and Belinda get some justice first.”

“I love that you talk about “justice” like it’s a solid _thing_ you can go out and get.”

“Claire believed that. And whatever you want to say about Alex, he believed that too.”


	5. Chapter 5

Tucker had wanted her to retire with him. She’d had bad days, bad weeks, bad cases (St. Fabiola’s was one, the townhouse home invasion was another, in part because it had happened only months after Tucker transferred to hostage negotiation, and Benson wondered what she must have done in a past life, or this one, to earn such bad luck) where she wanted to retire, where she was exhausted, _ready_ to be finished with her post once and for all. But when she thought about a lifetime of quiet with Tucker, moving to a semi-rural house upstate, or in Central Pennsylvania, like he’d suggested, the image didn’t sit right in her gut. She’d thought it over for a few weeks, knowing that her gut feelings about romantic relationships were not nearly as reliable as her gut feelings about criminal cases. 

The image of a lifetime of quiet in a semi-rural house with Tucker didn’t sit right in the reasonable, sensible part of her mind either. 

On the Monday after the Muñozes’ funeral, Benson arrived at the 16th precinct yawning, with circles under her eyes. Barba had come back with burgers on Saturday evening; she’d invited him for dinner because she knew he was still dealing with the aftereffects of his friends’ murder, of being kicked out of their funeral, and in return for the invitation, he promised to bring them dinner. After Noah went to bed, Barba helped her clean up and told her about the case he’d worked on with Claire Kincaid, his first special victims case. He told her stories about the Muñozes, about Alex talking about becoming the mayor of New York City when he was only 7 years old, about his determination, about Yelina’s intelligence. 

“And you?” Benson had asked. “What did you want to be when you were 7?”

“I don’t remember wanting to be a lawyer until I was in high school,” he said with a shrug, not really answering her question. 

He’d left around midnight. She couldn’t sleep. She finally dozed off around 4:30, only to be awakened by Lucy ringing the bell two-and-a-half hours later on Sunday morning. She had a 9 o’clock meeting with Eames, who’d been working for ten days straight. Eames’ city-federal joint task force was looking for the person or people who’d hired the hitman who had killed the Muñozes, and was reopening a dozen DUI cases as murders. The rapes would be handled by SVU in Manhattan and locally everywhere else, since that was just a matter of closing cold cases. 

Benson told Eames about Claire Kincaid, about the Hudson case she and Barba had been working on in 1996. Kincaid had also had at least ten open criminal cases on her desk when she was killed. Eames agreed that the investigation into her death should be re-opened, 22 years later, as murder for hire. 

As Benson was leaving, Eames told her that she should take the captain’s exam, which was being offered again in March. “Dodds says that not enough lieutenants have taken the exam in the last few years,” she said. “He’ll probably go for it, especially since you already head up a department.”

“Dodds and I,” Benson said, “are not always on each others’ good sides.”

Eames’ eyes narrowed. “So he still blames you, not the monster who killed his son?”

“Politics,” Benson said.

“Politics. Please. You should go for it. In these joint task forces we’ve been operating there are sometimes incidental sexual assaults that get lost in the fray, in the big picture. We need someone who doesn’t let sexual assaults get lost in the fray.”

Two thoughts came to Benson’s mind: first, sexual assaults in “big picture” cases should never be _incidental_ , and she really could fix that problem if given the chance to head up a joint task force; second, didn’t those task forces work with federal and state attorneys? With a job like that, she could continue the work she’d been doing to draw more attention to properly investigating, prosecuting, and funding sexual assault cases, and she wouldn’t have to work with the Manhattan DA’s office. 

“I’ll think about it,” she told Eames. That was enough to keep her awake most of the night on Sunday. 

“What’s up, Carisi?” she asked when she realized that the detective was following her to her office.

“Did you talk to Captain Eames?”

“Yes. The two rapes in Manhattan are ours.”

“Three. DNA just came in.”

“Good. Talk to the victims, close the cases, wrap it up.”

“Did Eames say anything about the hitman’s identity?”

“No, and that has nothing to do with our side of the case.”

“Just wanted to see if my theory was right. There’s a driver’s license for a Matt Morretti that matches a real birth certificate from Connecticut.”

“Not our side of the case.”

“All right. Anyway, there’s a Griseida Guzman here to see you. She’s at my desk, didn’t want to give specifics, only wants to talk to you.”

“Send her in,” Benson said. She vaguely recognized the first name, and wondered if her visitor could possibly be Yelina Muñoz’s sister, who she’d briefly met when the sister’s husband was questioned for paying off a 15-year-old with whom Alex was exchanging photos. 

“Lieutenant,” the woman said, following Carisi into the office. “I’m Griseida Guzman, Yelina’s sister.”

“Yes,” Benson said, shaking Griseida’s hand. “I’m sorry we have to meet again under these circumstances.” 

“Much worse circumstances than the last time, now that Yelina is gone.”

Benson nodded at Carisi, who returned to the squadroom, closing the door behind him. 

“Please,” she said, motioning for Griseida to sit. Benson hung up her coat and sat behind her desk. “I was genuinely sorry to hear about your sister. It’s a real tragedy.”

“Wouldn’t have happened if Alex was mayor. Nobody in their right mind would have put a hit out on the mayor.”

“My department didn’t handle anything beyond the initial investigation back then.”

“Yeah, well, you exposed my ex for the sleazeball he is, so I’ll give you credit for that. But Alex, he would have done so much for the city. Rafael just couldn’t look the other way. You know the saying “his heart was in the right place”? Rafael’s heart was in the wrong place.”

Benson suppressed her instinct to defend Barba because she needed to hear what Griseida had to say.

“Alex and Yelina, their hearts were always in the right place, even if they went a little too far with thinking “the ends justify the means” all the time. I know Alex had a problem, a really big one, but … I think I might know what got them killed, and it had nothing to do with that.”

“Have you talked to anyone with the joint task force?”

“Not about this. Captain Eames talked to me personally a couple times, but I honestly didn’t think of this until after the funeral. I wanted to come to you because Alex and Yelina were trying to help sexual assault victims. It was sexual assault of minors, and Yelina said here in New York, you can’t press charges if you’re older than 23 but something happened to you as a kid. It was a bunch of high school students in the 70s and 80s, a lot of them. I don’t want the good work they were trying to do to get lost in the murder investigation.”

“I understand. Tell me who they were trying to help.”

“You’ve got to help these people, lieutenant. They really need it, and this was Alex and Yelina’s shot at redemption. I know they did bad, corrupt things. It hurt me to see Yelina stand by Alex no matter what. It hurt me to find out that she used to call in death threats against the women Alex was cheating with if they said they’d talk to the press. But I swear, they were also dedicated to helping people who were stuck. I know this probably makes no sense to you.”

It made sense. She’d heard similar arguments from Barba on Saturday night.

“These three women came to him last spring, when he was starting up the new campaign,” Griseida continued. “He met them before, when he was on the state senate. In the 80s, they were students at Hudson University High School. Scholarship students, from the South Bronx. They’d been raped — more than once — by two different teachers who’d hang out in the dorms in Manhattan and look for kids to strike up conversations with, to find out more about their family lives, so they could — what’s it called —“

“Groom them,” Benson said.

“Yes, exactly, that’s what Yelina said. So these women, they were told their scholarships included dorm rooms at Hudson University because it would be easier for them to commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn than all the way from the Bronx. It was like the school was doing them a favor. But these teachers, they went after students who’d have otherwise had to go to the worst public schools — that’s one of the reasons why Alex was fighting so hard for public school funding, you know — they went after kids who didn’t have family around, kids with undocumented parents, on purpose, because they could threaten them to be quiet. Yelina said one girl went to the principal and he told her if she said anything about her “inappropriate relationship” with a teacher, the police would probably deport her parents. It was eating Yelina alive, knowing all this. This was our neighborhood growing up, 20 or 30 people.”

“What were she and Alex planning to do about it?” Benson asked.

_Claire and I knew there had to be a lot more, given the scope of the coverup, the lengths the university went to,_ Barba had said on Saturday. 

“Like I said, in New York, someone sexually abused as a minor can’t press charges after they turn 23. Alex was going to change that law if he was elected.”

_The politicians won’t change the statutes_ , Barba had told her. _Too many special-interest groups lobbying against it. “What if an adult decides to scam us out of millions of dollars with a false report?” Is what they say, when in reality, they don’t want to lose millions of dollars on legitimate cases that adults might bring against them. Claire said the law had to be changed in the courtroom, decided on the bench, not by fickle politicians who want votes from people who put organizational coherence above children’s rights._

“Ms. Guzman, you have my word, SVU will look into this,” Benson said. “But if this is what you think got your sister and brother-in-law killed, we need to tell Captain Eames.”

“So, Yelina called in death threats against anybody who threatened Alex, you know that already. Somebody in the provost’s office at Hudson said Alex would look like a fool for talking about the sexual assault of minors. Alex didn’t assault anybody, he did illegal, disgusting things, but —“

“I know. I understand. You can be mad at both Alex and the people who killed him.”

“Yelina comes to me, really scared, tells me about what she’s been doing all these years with the death threats — I couldn’t believe she’d sunk so low, what Alex had turned her into, but she was doing it for a good reason at the time, right? — and she tells me —“ Griseida stopped to catch her breath. “She tells me —“

“It’s okay,” Benson assured her. “My department is going to do everything we can to make sure these victims get justice.”

“What can you do if nobody’s able to press charges?”

“We’ll find a way.”

“With the law? Who’s going to do that, Rafael?”

“We’ll find a way.”

“Yelina and Alex found out that a guy who worked in the provost’s office was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill somebody back in the 90s. When they realized this guy, who was 80 years old and died before he even went to jail was probably a — a —“

“A fall guy,” Benson said. That was what Barba had suspected at the time, but he was a 26-year-old assistant, and the case really couldn’t move forward without Kincaid.

“Right, right. Yelina was worried, she said they might take the threats seriously and kill her. I told her she had to say something, but she begged me not to tell anyone, otherwise Alex would never make it back to the state senate. She cared more about politics than her own life. Tell somebody, I said, for God’s sake, tell Rafael, even.”

“We will do everything we can,” Benson promised again. She was struck by another coincidence almost too bizarre to be real: the Muñoz murders last week and Claire Kincaid’s murder in 1996 had not only involved the same hitman, but the hits on all three victims might have also been ordered by the same people, the same office at Hudson University. 

—

By Tuesday evening, the floor of Barba’s office was littered with reports and file folders, some of which he’d requested from the clerks downstairs, otherwise which had been sent over from Brooklyn. They were records and transcripts from the Hudson case, from 1995 through 1998: sexual assaults of minors that couldn’t be prosecuted without Claire Kincaid taking them all the way to the court of appeals, changing the law independent of politicians who could be lobbied by special interests. 

Alone in the office, having wrapped up two other cases and prepared his opening statement for a trial starting later in the week, Barba examined the files, tiptoeing around them in his socks so he wouldn’t leave a footprint on any of the folders. With all his talent, training, intelligence, years of experience, he had no idea where to start. 

And he had to start soon, because Eames wanted all the files by Friday. 

He heard a knock on the door.

“Rafael?” The voice was Jack McCoy’s. Barba found himself disappointed.

“Come in,” he said. 

McCoy opened the door and stepped inside, stumbling when he saw the files on the floor. “Is this —“

“Yes,” Barba said.

McCoy sat on the couch, clasped his hands together, and looked down. “I could have asked NYPD to investigate Claire’s death as a murder when it happened. I should had the presence of mind. She was working on high-profile criminal cases, for God’s sake, they should have at least considered it.”

“The guy blew a BAC of 0.2 at the scene,” Barba said. “How could anybody have known he wasn’t really drunk?”

“Claire’s mother is gone, her stepfather’s in his 80s, she didn’t have all that much family around. You’re giving all of this to the joint task force?”

“After I go through it.”

“You need to be careful. If someone at Hudson ordered the hit, this is effectively the same case as the Muñoz murders. You can’t be involved outside of the original case you were working on with Claire in 1996.”

“Right,” Barba said, sitting behind his desk, looking up at the ceiling as he swiveled his chair, “right.”

“This office has long had problems with ADAs working cases with personal connections, or cases that hit too close to home.”

“You’ve gotten a lot of that under control.”

“If there’s a heaven, Schiff’s up there laughing. You cracked him up. _Jack McCoy getting impropriety at the DAs office under control, that’ll be the day._ I can hear him.”

“That’s why the murder cases will be tried by federal attorneys. Do you think they can try whoever did this on 3 counts of murder-for-hire at the same trial? More than 21 years between the two murders, one trial. Is there any legal precent for that?” Curious, Barba opened Westlaw on his desktop computer. 

“That’s a gamble, double-jeopardy-wise,” McCoy said. 

“It’d be a tour-de-force if a prosecutor could pull it off. But a jury that convicts on one count of murder-for-hire would be very, very likely to also convict on the other two.”

“You need to concentrate on the sexual assault cases. You’ll be taking those all the way to the Court of Appeals when they’re thrown out because of the statute of limitations.”

Barba smiled. “For Claire.”

“Yes, for Claire.”

“She was going to be a federal judge.”

“I know.” McCoy’s face fell. “If I hadn’t called her that night, she would be.”

Barba empathized. If he’d pressed Yelina further when she’d come to him, she’d still be alive too. 

“Claire would be a federal judge. She said she’d do her ten years in criminal court, and then apply for an appointment. She’d probably have been sworn in a few years ago. She’d be 53, I think, and we’d have a 21-year old this February.”

Barba pretended to look surprised. He’d known. There was a week not long before her death where she ate tangerines every day for breakfast, likely because she couldn’t stomach anything else, when they’d had cake for a secretary’s retirement and Kincaid couldn’t take more than three bites. There were the mornings she came in looking like she’d cried all night. The Centre Street rumor mill said that the pregnancy was unintended and that the EADA was not pleased with Kincaid’s decision that right then was a good time to have a baby. Barba knew a lot of the story. He knew most of it.

“My daughter didn’t speak to me for ten years. She was a teenager, said I ruined Claire’s life. When she went away to college, she’d come home and only visit her mother. It dawned on me then that I was a bastard. My father was a bastard before me, but an entirely different sort of bastard.” McCoy stood up, grasping the arm of the sofa to steady himself. “Well. Sorry to chew your ear off, Rafael.” 

“If you’ve still got a good bottle of scotch upstairs,” Barba said, “we’ll drink one of these days to Claire Kincaid, bastard fathers, and this office.”

Standing in the doorway, McCoy folded his arms and nodded slowly. “Don’t let the politics of this job, or the NYPD, or the bar association consume you,” he said. “You belong on a bench. I’m sorry it didn’t work out that way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know: "Why is there so little Barson in this 3 million word chapter? How dare you!" (It's around 3000, but it feels like 3 million.) The next two chapters will have action, adventure, angst, and canoodling.


	6. Chapter 6

“The more I read, the more I re-read, the more convinced I am that Hudson is not a university but an organized crime syndicate.” Barba was sitting between his sofa and coffee table at home, his knees halfway drawn to his chest, an open file folder propped up in his lap. Benson sat next to him, her legs stretched out under the coffee table, where her tablet and more folders were resting. “I mean, there are actual RICO statutes that apply here.”

“Rafa.”

“What?” 

“My mother taught at Hudson for 20 years. She was at Columbia before that. They wouldn’t give her tenure. Hudson did. If I had the slightest hint of a stable childhood, it was because of Hudson.”

They’d been working on the Hudson cases all morning and afternoon. Rollins had Noah with her; Benson had watched Jesse on Friday evening while Rollins and Fin had spoken to the three victims who’d been in contact with Alex Muñoz.

There were at least thirty more.

And even though the teachers who’d raped students had been fired in 1995, Hudson had spent the better part of the last 40 years covering up the crimes that had taken place in the dorms in Manhattan and in the high school building in Brooklyn. Four people — at least — had been killed because of the cover-up, and the man who’d been convicted for the first of those murders had been himself set up as a fall guy for someone else, or multiple other people, in the provost’s office.

“The corruption was clearly limited only to the administration, not the faculty,” Barba tried to assure her. “But you remember Manor Hill, they buckled fairly quickly as soon as we bore down. The scope of what went on at Hudson must have been huge. And —“

“You don’t have to —“

“You’ll see, when the feds file charges, they’ll file RICO. Against the administration.” 

Benson rolled her neck. “My mother would have come to me if she’d heard anything, if she’d known anything. We had a horrible relationship — I won’t get into that — but she’d have come to me, at least later on, when I was first with SVU.”

Blowing a puff of air from his lips, Barba shut the folder in his lap and returned it to the table. He turned onto his side so that his shoulder was resting against the couch and his hip was pressed into the floor. “Don’t do that to yourself. I’ve gone down that road before, in the courtroom even, while questioning witnesses, and it’s not good. Not worthwhile, not helpful, not healthy, as they say.”

“Right,” she said, “right. Do you know that I tried to get out of her house when I was 16 years old by marrying one of her graduate students?” 

“You were married?” 

“No, engaged. I was 16 and he was 24.” 

“Even a scholarship to Harvard won’t get you out of the house.” 

“Figuratively.”

“Yes.” He shifted back into a sitting position. “So, we’re going to take these guys down like we took Optimum down. The assault cases, the murders, everything, we’ll drain them financially in litigation, and no one will want to enroll there after the story hits the press.”

“What’s the plan?” Benson asked.

“It’s risky. To indict the university on conspiracy charges, I’ll have to convene a grand jury and convince them to indict on conspiracy to cover up 30 crimes that, according to New York State law, can’t be considered criminal acts because the victims didn’t come forward before they turned 23.”

“I’ll be there for the grand jury.”

“Yes. You’ll need to testify.”

“I’ll be there as much as I can, outside my testimony, to root for you.”

“Liv, come on.”

She pressed her shoulder to his. “You’re my team,” she said. “My local hero. I root for you.”

“The Optimum victory, so much of that was you and your squad.” He looked over at her and couldn’t help flashing a crooked smile. “We’ll get this done. We’ll find a way.”

“I know.” She leaned in and kissed his neck. A single, closed-mouth kiss, but it was too intimate nevertheless. “I’m talking to Dodds next month about taking the captain’s exam. Eames says there may be an opportunity for me to do what she does, but with sex assault cases. I’ll be working with state and federal attorneys.”

“Oh? When would that happen?”

“The exam’s in March. My promotion and new orders probably wouldn’t come through until next year at this time.” She moved in closer again, resting her head near his shoulder, her lips touching a spot of skin exposed by his polo shirt just above his collarbone.

“Don’t tell me you’re lonely, Liv,” he teased.

“I don’t get lonely.”

“What’s this, then?” he asked as she began to trail her lips up his neck. 

“Something else.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“We should have met in an alternate universe, or when you were still in Brooklyn.”

He let out a languid sigh. She’d reminded him of the reason he’d requested a lateral transfer into Manhattan in the first place, the case whose remnants were now spread across his coffee table.

“I don’t get lonely,” she repeated. “ _Lonely_ is the wrong … adjective, let’s just say.”

With a salacious laugh, he kissed the inside of her wrist, just like he had the morning he woke up in her bed. “If I’m working for the Attorney General 250 miles away, that will not resolve the issue either of us has with … loneliness,” he teased. 

“I know,” she said, sitting up against the couch again. “And besides,” she added, slapping her hand down on the coffee table, “we have this case.” 

“We have this case.”

— 

Miraculously (“closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever seen,” Jack McCoy said), Barba’s strategy worked. The charges stuck briefly enough that they were able to convene a grand jury to indict — they hoped — the current and former provosts of Hudson University, along with five others who’d worked for the provost’s office. Eames’ team was working on gathering enough evidence for concurrent federal charges. 

Barba had ten days’ worth of evidence to present to the grand jury. A few days before Thanksgiving, he wrapped up before lunch, and was told to return for the decision later that afternoon. 

Benson and Carisi met him outside the courthouse. They’d both testified, Benson a week earlier, Carisi that morning, about the evidence that SVU had on sexual assaults of high school students at the Hudson dorms in Manhattan, and the ensuing cover-up that had killed Kincaid and a whistleblower before her. No one was allowed to mention the Muñozes, whose specific case was being handled by federal attorneys. 

“This was all one case, really,” Carisi said as they walked across Foley Square, regrouping and getting some fresh air before the indictment came through (or not). 

“You think so, ADA Carisi?” Barba joked. 

“Don’t steal him from me,” Benson said.

“Please. But he’s right. It’s all one case. It’s all one cover-up.”

“ _But_ ,” Carisi said, “with separate trials and investigations, you have a better chance of changing the statutes.”

“Yes.”

“When do you head to appeals court?”

“Not until February. Therein lies the problem.”

“That’s two months trying to get the provost and his buddies into a courtroom on conspiracy to cover up a crime that nobody’s been charged with yet, that the law says nobody can be charged with at all.”

“Not exactly. I finally got one of the teachers in 1998, when I started with Brooklyn SVU. One count, four years, I was disappointed with myself back then but that conviction is what’s keeping this case afloat until we can get the rest of the charges to stick.” Barba held up a finger as Carisi started to talk again. “One second. Need —“ He turned towards a coffee cart, taking a single step forward.

He didn’t get to say _coffee_ because as he was talking, as he was turning towards the cart, taking that one step, a bullet sliced through the material of his coat, across his left arm. 

Benson jumped on top of him. For three seconds, he thought he was dead. “You were grazed, you were grazed,” he heard her say. His arm felt like it had been set on fire, all the skin ripped away. “You turned just in time, Rafa, your dependency on coffee saved your life.” As he sat up, she touched her hand to his cheek. “You’re okay,” she promised. “You’re okay.” 

“Nobody in the crowd was hit,” Carisi said. “That means the shot came from above. Backup’s on the way, buildings are all locked down.” 

Benson helped Barba sit on the curb while an FDNY paramedic knelt down in front of them to assist with the injury. The paramedic removed his jacket and cut him out of his dress shirt, which would have bothered him if not for the searing pain in his arm. She applied pressure to control the bleeding. 

“Not as bad as it looks,” the paramedic assured him. 

“Get the guy, Olivia, don’t sit here with me!”

“Rafa, breathe,” Benson said. “There’s at least 20 NYPD here already. Breathe.”

His teeth were gritted together in pain. At least the pain kept him from thinking too much about what had just happened. At least the pain curtailed his fear, his terror.

His heart, still racing, didn’t get the message. 

“Guitar case! 9 o’clock. Broadway,” he heard Carisi say. “That one!” 

“Your blood pressure is on the low side,” the paramedic said gently. “Can you tell me your name and —“

“Rafael Barba, 2017, and I’m not answering the next question.”

“All right, Rafael, we’re going to get the ambulance over here as soon as the scene is cleared.”

Barba nodded. Benson kissed his temple, near his hairline.

“Don’t do that, you’re going to make me lose my case.”

“Shut up.” She squeezed his hand, which was trembling. “We’ll worry about that later. Hudson going after whistleblowers and ADAs is the bigger problem.”

A voice over Benson’s radio: _Shots fired._

Carisi’s voice: _Lieu, we need a bus for our perp and one for … me._

“What happened?” Barba asked.

“I don’t know.” She rubbed his back over the blanket the paramedic had thrown over his shoulders. “I have to go check on my detective. Will you be all right here? The officers have secured the scene.” 

“Yes. Do what you need to do.” 

An NYPD sergeant pointed to a subway entrance. “Lieutenant Benson?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Your detective got him.”

“Oh, thank God,” was all that came out of her mouth, even though she should have asked for details. 

She descended the steps to find Carisi on the platform in the fetal position, bruised nd bleeding, still clutching his weapon while two officers arrested the shooter. They told Benson that the man, who was hiding a more sophisticated, military-style weapon in a repurposed guitar case, had pointed a handgun at Carisi. “Got him, got him, got him,” Carisi practically croaked. 

He’d disarmed the perp with a single, non-fatal shot to the right arm, falling down half a flight of cement steps in the process. “Sonny, you’re a hero,” Benson said, squatting near him. 

“I must look real bad for you to call me Sonny.”

She tried not to think too much about falling down half a flight of subway steps. At least he hadn’t taken a header, at least he’d fallen entirely sideways. 

“Barba okay?” Carisi asked.

“Graze wound. Do you want me to call anyone to meet you at the hospital?”

“Wait till I’m there and there’s good news. I wouldn’t put you through the nightmare of telling my family I was injured on the job.”

“All right. I’m calling Rollins and Fin. I’ll see you at —?” She looked up at the paramedics who’d just arrived on the scene. 

“Mercy,” one of them said.

“I’ll see you there.”

She hurried back up to Barba, who was sitting up in the ambulance while a detective who Benson recognized from Major Case took his statement. “You know Captain Eames, right?” Benson said. “This is her team’s case. They’ll take Mr. Barba’s statement.”

“Lieutenant Benson.” She felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Just a minute. I need to make sure we’re not spreading this too thin, that the right people are handling it.” She told the Major Case detective to get in touch with Eames, called Fin to ask him to coordinate with Eames’ team, and then, finally, turned around to talk to Jack McCoy, who was accompanied by an NYPD detail. 

“I’m going in myself to get that indictment,” he said, leaning in towards the back of the ambulance so that Barba could hear him. 

“It’s no use. Half the grand jury was probably out here on their way to grab lunch,” Barba said. “Hudson’s lawyers will get the indictment thrown out.”

“Carisi got the shooter, alive,” Benson told them. “He’s going to answer all Eames’ questions. No matter what, we are bringing Hudson University down.”

“I’ll let you know what happens with the grand jury,” McCoy said. 

Benson climbed into the ambulance. “What are you doing?” Barba asked.

“Riding with you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re scared to death and could use a friend.”

“I’m not _scared to death_ , Liv.”

“I’ll sit right here and pretend I believe you.”

Without answering, he took her hand, intertwining his fingers with hers, and drew it closer to him.


	7. Chapter 7

“He’s a lawyer. He went to Harvard. He’s not supposed to be getting shot at.” Barba heard his mother’s voice echoing through the emergency room hallway. “Rafi!” she said, her voice breaking as she hurried over to his hospital bed and embraced him, paying no attention to his bandaged arm.

“Ow, ow … ow! Mami, please, I don’t need any more skin ripped off.”

She backed away a centimeter or two, but kept a hand on the shoulder opposite the injury. “You’re all I’ve got left,” Lucia said. “Don’t do this to me again. You’re all I’ve got left.”

“Mami, I’m safe,” he assured her. 

He smiled at Benson, who’d appeared in the doorway. 

Lucia turned around. “Look at my son, look at him, I didn’t send him to Harvard so —“

“So he could take down a corrupt organization?” Benson asked. “So he can help change the law, get justice for people who were sexually assaulted as children?”

“Change the law. Please. Thank God your abuelita’s not alive to see this.”

“It was a graze wound. The only reason I’m still here is that my blood pressure was very low at the scene.” Barba wiggled his right hand, where an IV had been placed. “They’re stabilizing it and then sending me home.”

 _Your heart probably skipped a beat,_ the attending had explained. _It’s normal under that type of stress._

“Home? Where these guys are probably waiting to finish the job?”

“I told you, I’m safe.”

“Mrs. Barba,” Benson said, moving closer to the bed, “one of my detectives caught the man who did this. He’s being questioned as we speak.”

“How is Carisi?” Barba asked.

“In surgery, but not bad, considering. He broke all of his ribs. All of them. They have to do a laparoscopy to find and clear out bone fragments. I saw him just before they took him up to the OR. He’s very proud of himself, was bragging to the staff that he broke every single one of his ribs.”

“He got your left arm,” Lucia told her son. “He was aiming for your heart.”

“We have a police detail on him until the case is wrapped up,” Benson said.

“You’re staying on the case?” Lucia asked him, now even more exasperated.

“Mami.”

“You should go into private practice _y renunciar esta mierda_ ,” Lucia said. “ _No entiendo por qué aún no has hecho eso."_

“ _Mami, Liv le entiende_.”

“I’m not saying it’s your fault, Lieutenant, I’m just saying he should have moved on from this job years ago.”

Barba closed his eyes, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion. It was only early evening, not even 7 o’clock yet, but he wanted to sleep. As soon as he gave in to his exhaustion, however, his eyes opened with a start: he remembered how close he’d come to death, how if he hadn’t turned at precisely the second he did, he’d be in the morgue. 

He’d have been shot through the heart.

“Raf?” Lucia asked.

“I love you,” he told his mother.

“See,” Lucia said, squeezing his hand (the one with the IV in it, of course), “you really did almost die.”

“Your son is doing good work,” Benson said. “He’s working to get justice for victims who the law has turned away for years.”

A resident came in to check Barba’s vitals and said she’d send a nurse in to remove the IV so he could be discharged. He’d have to change his bandage and apply a prescription ointment every six hours for the next three days, and then return for a follow-up. All in all, better than being shot through the heart. 

When Lucia went into the waiting room to call a friend to pick her up, Benson moved closer to the bed. “Come home with me,” she said. “There’s already a detail on my place. I had them put one on Noah’s school, too, to be extra cautious. We’ll pick up clothes from your apartment and tell the officer there.”

“You’ll tell him I’m sleeping over? I don’t think that’ll help convince the appeals court that this is a solid, untarnished case we’re bringing them.”

“You say that now, but how will you feel when you wake up in a quiet apartment at 2AM?”

“I often wake up in a quiet apartment at 2AM.”

“You know what I mean.”

He did. And life clearly had the potential to cut itself off in your mid-forties, especially when you were a determined prosecutor going after a university that operated like a crime syndicate. He let Benson accompany him to his apartment to pick up clothing for the next day, and then returned home with her in a squad car. 

There were no messages from Carmen, or EADA Cutter, or McCoy. The judge must have asked the grand jury to reconvene the next day, or the next week. Barba hoped he wouldn’t have to start over. 

Benson helped him wrap his arm in the surgical shield they’d given him at the hospital so he could shower and remedy some of the aftereffects of being thrown onto a New York City sidewalk and getting cut out of his bloody clothing. 

After he left the shower, Benson went in. In Benson’s bedroom, he removed his towel, slipped on the boxers and pajama pants he’d brought from his place, and then attempted to put on a clean undershirt, quickly foiled by the stinging and low range of motion in his bandaged left arm, and the soreness in his right arm, where he’d been given a tetanus booster. 

Still better than being shot through the heart. 

He gave up and lay on the bed, on top of the comforter, waiting for Benson to return so that he could humiliate himself by asking her to help him put on his undershirt. Clutching the undershirt, he sank into the pillow and this time, really let exhaustion overwhelm him. 

—

When he woke up, the bedroom was dark, a draft from the window overtaking the heat clanging in the radiators. Benson was next to him, on her side, under the covers, one hand reaching up, splayed across his chest, near his heart. He placed a hand over hers while he strategized how to get under the covers without waking her. 

He saw a smile spread across her face. 

Benson wore a spaghetti-strapped nightgown, not the sort of sleepwear that protected you from drafts coming in through 7th-floor apartment windows on windy November nights in Manhattan. Self-centeredly, he wondered if she’d worn it for him. 

Her eyes were still closed. She was still smiling. 

Maybe the sniper who’d shot him from the roof of a mid-rise office building had succeeded after all. Maybe he was dead.

He shuddered. She felt it. She opened her eyes.

“Rafael,” she said, propping herself up on one arm, looking down at him. “Come on. Get under the covers.”

“I couldn’t get my shirt back on over my head. Must have caught a chill.”

“Here.” She helped him under the covers, ceremoniously tossing his undershirt across the room. “I’ll keep you warm,” she promised, drawing closer. 

“Liv —“

“I know, I know, we’ve been down this road before. I know that the last time I was with a charming, handsome prosecutor, a star defense attorney saw it as a chance to take our case apart. But Rafa, the Hudson case is huge, it’s in three different courts already, and — if that hitman hadn’t missed his shot, if you hadn’t turned around, I don’t know what —“

He cut her off with a kiss.

They held on to each other as if this was their last chance. 

With everything going on around them, with Hudson’s criminality, recklessness, sheer disregard for the law and for people’s lives, it might as well have been their last chance.

“Are you cold too?” he asked, sliding a spaghetti strap down her shoulder.

“Not anymore.”

—

Barba woke up at sunrise to Benson kissing a path from his shoulder to his chin. When she reached his lips, she flung a leg over him and pressed her body into his. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile like that,” she said. 

“You have. I smiled like this the first time you kissed me.”

“When I promised you we could be together if —“ She shook her head. “I’m tired. You exhausted me.”

“Are you feeling less … lonely … now?” he teased. 

She slapped his chest and he laughed. “I’ve got to get out of bed before Noah wakes up. He needs to think I slept on the couch.”

“Is it because you don’t want him to ask questions?”

“Noah can ask whatever questions he wants. I don’t want him to tell Rollins.”

“I’m sure the two officers who have been downstairs all night can guess what’s going on.”

“It’s none of their business. And you know what? The world didn’t fall apart when Bayard Ellis found out about me and Haden. You’re not my boss, I’m not yours, there’s no uncomfortable power relations here, so we’re fine.”

“You’ve changed your tune on that.”

“Because I made a mistake. You and I should have been together three years ago.” She kissed his neck, his shoulder, his ribcage. “When he heard that shot yesterday, I thought I lost you.” She was trailing kisses down his stomach, playing with the hem of his boxers, her eyes dark, teasing, when Barba’s phone rang, buzzing against the bedside table. 

He picked up the phone and looked at the screen. “McCoy, damn it,” he groaned.

“Maybe it’s good news about the indictment.” She threw off the covers. “I’m going to the couch. We’ll finish this _conversation_ tonight?” she asked with a delicious smirk. 

“Yes, please,” he said, his hips bucking involuntarily.

“Get that under control when you call your boss back.”

“You just made it worse.”

“How?” 

“The way you said _get that under control_.”

“Oh. You like that?” From the other side of the room, she threw him a kiss. “I love driving you crazy.”

“I love _you_.”

She raised her eyebrows, then hopped back on the bed, crawling back towards him, offering him a quick-but-open-mouthed kiss. “I love you too, Rafa, but, wow, one near-death experience and you’re as soft and gentle as Eddie the Elephant.”

“I never trusted that elephant.”

“Shut up.” She kissed him again. “Go call McCoy. And keep this” — she pointed back and forth between them — “under wraps.”

“Do you really think I’d tell my boss that I had you bent over the side of the bed last night?” he whispered, now outright grinning at her. 

“You’re filthy. A beautiful, filthy man.”

“And yes, I understand that we have to keep this under wraps until Hudson burns to the ground, because you and I are not this foolish.”

She clasped her hands together. “Yes. Call McCoy.”

He emerged from the bedroom ten minutes later, having managed at least to get his undershirt on, and found Benson in the living room, drinking a cup of coffee while she sat on the couch, where she’d set up a blanket and pillow so that Noah would think she’d slept there. “Well?” she asked.

“Can I take you and Noah out for breakfast?”

“How will that look?”

“Like a man who stayed at his NYPD lieutenant best friend’s apartment after a hit was put out on him, where she slept on the couch and he slept in her bed.”

“I’ll wake up Noah and get him ready, you dirty liar. Are we celebrating?”

“We got the indictment, and Eames got a confession last night from the man who shot me. She’s good.“

“She’s really good. Was on Major Case a long time.”

“On account of the confession, the Court of Appeals moved us up to December. You and me, Liv, we’re going to finish the work Claire Kincaid was doing to take Hudson University down, we’re going to finish the work that she was doing, that Alex was trying to do from the political end, to get the statutes changed. We’re going to make this happen, you and me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- 99% chance I screwed up the Spanish pronouns or dialect. If there’s anything I can fix in that short exchange, let me know! 
> 
> \- I am terrible at smut writing, so I just sort of write “around” the smut. (If I have any talent whatsoever, describing Olivia Benson's nipples is beyond the scope of that talent. Don't quote me on that.)
> 
> \- I started this story a few weeks ago, right after I finished “Cantilever.” This is what I got up to, so next update in about a week.
> 
> \- More angst awaits. I’m figuring 14 chapters, but not sure yet. I promise not to drag this one out forever!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "How many hitmen can one university afford?"

Dodds called Benson down to 1 Police Plaza a week after the shooting. “You’ve still got a detail on you?” he asked. “Get this case wrapped up. Hand everything you can over to the joint task force. Protecting you from Hudson University all year is not in the NYPD’s budget.”

_Protecting you._ She heard the resentment in his voice. Even now, two and a half years later, she couldn’t blame him, most of the time.

“The appeal was moved up to December. That’s good news for us.”

“What business do you have with the Court of Appeals?” Benson and Dodds were both senior NYPD with decades of experience; neither of them asked questions to which they didn’t already know the answers. 

“I’ll be testifying at —“

“I saw you put in to take the captain’s exam. I think that’s an excellent idea.” 

What was Dodds up to?

“Yes,” she said.

“Captain Eames speaks very highly of you. She says you’d be a good candidate to head up a joint task force.”

“That’s what I’m looking to do.”

“Well, Lieutenant, I will happily sign off on you taking the exam. However, your duties require that you wrap up this Hudson case as efficiently as possible, and that we give DA McCoy a case free of conflicts of interest.”

So that’s what this discussion was about. “I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. You have a history of —“

“Please don’t finish that sentence.”

“I’m not criticizing your personal life, that’d be inappropriate. I’m pointing out that there are codes of conduct, and an ADA can’t — _fraternize_ — with a detective, or police lieutenant, who he calls as a witness on a regular basis. You’re otherwise giving all the defense attorneys in this city a gift wrapped up with a bow. Bayard Ellis, for instance.”

Benson clenched her teeth and clutched the thin wooden armrests on her chair. “Excuse me.”

“This isn’t a personal attack,” Dodds continued. “The mayor and governor agree on one thing, and only one thing, and it’s that Hudson University needs to be wiped off the face of the earth. They cost NYPD and the DAs office a lot of money, and their campus is responsible for a very high percentage of violent crime in this city.” He was trying, with his talk of politics and percentages, to make his criticism sound less like an attack on her personal life, less like a commentary on who she was sleeping with, Benson could tell. “So as much as you’d be an excellent candidate for a joint task force — and I do believe you are, Olivia, honestly — if you continue _fraternizing_ with the people you work with in the DAs office, your job will be on the line.” 

From 1 Police Plaza, Benson headed to Barba’s office to tell him what had been said, to suggest that they cool their relationship until either the Hudson case was wrapped up or until she was promoted and transferred, whichever came first.”

“That whole conversation, everything Dodds said,” Barba told her, “it’s a civil lawsuit waiting to happen.”

“I know. But he’s also _right_. David Haden and I had to end our relationship for exactly those reasons.”

“So we’re going to wait around again for something that’s never going to happen?”

“What’s never going to happen? You don’t think I’ll be promoted?”

“No, no, of course you’ll be promoted. I’ll be in this office forever, and even if I’m promoted to EADA someday, there’ll always be that risk of a conflict, won’t there?”

“Oh.” She sat on the couch and patted the spot next to her. “Rafa. Come sit.”

He shook his head quickly, leaning against his desk instead. “No fraternizing.”

“You told me you wanted to stay on the prosecutorial side of things.”

“That’s right. I did.”

“The prosecutorial —“

“Liv, just stop. We are causing too many problems, you and I, for the courts, the mayor, the governor’s office. You’re right. If I were you, I’d still talk to Rita Calhoun about suing Dodds over what he said, but you’re right.”

“You wanted to be a judge.”

“Stop!” He took a breath, clearly dismayed by his own (over)reaction. “That’s inconsequential.”

“That could never be inconsequential.” She leaned back, searching his expression. “You wanted to be a judge. Your gr —“

“No.”

“Your grandmother —“

“Is lucky not to be around to see me almost get shot through the heart, is lucky not to be around to see me almost disbarred over a stupid decision I made years ago.”

“I told you, that night, the night before her funeral, that there wouldn’t be a conflict of interest anymore when you were on the bench.”

“You did. But if we’re going to “cool it for a while” for the sake of appearances, we can’t have this conversation.”

“Rafa. I’m sorry>”

“What else is new.” His tone was flat. “We can’t have this conversation. I’ll see you next time you bring me a case.”

“Yes. I’m not breaking it off, Rafa, I’m saying we should cool it until you win Hudson.”

“I get it.” Benson stood, and Barba walked with her to the door. “You remember at the diner last week, when we saw the little girl with her parents, reading _Ferdinand_? Noah told me he’d never read that book. I promised to pick him up a copy. It’s at home. I’ll drop it off with you next time I’m at the precinct.”

She pressed her lips together into a wistful half-smile and placed a hand over her heart. “You should bring it to him yourself.”

“Not when the officers who follow me around so I don’t get killed report back to Dodds, apparently.”

“I don’t want Noah to be disappointed.”

“Again.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She didn’t give him time to answer before she walked away. 

—

“Rafael?”

“Belinda.” He looked up from his desk at ADA Cowan, who stood in the doorway to his office. “Jack said you were back to work already.”

“Back in the courtroom as of this morning.”

“The Walmond case?”

“How did you know?”

“I’ve been following it. The original crime passed through SVU. Please, sit.”

“You’re keeping busy with the Hudson case?” Cowan asked, sitting across from him.

“It’s my whole calendar for the next six weeks. I head up to Albany next week, and if all goes well we’ll have more charges to press before the trial in January.”

“Good,” she said, “good.”

“How are you doing?”

“Managing.”

“McCoy have you his word he wouldn’t press charges, I hope.”

“He did. Rafael, I have some — input — that might be useful to you regarding Hudson, but it’s problematic and inadmissible because it’s pillow talk.”

_Pillow talk._ The phrase reminded him of Benson, who he hadn’t seen in a week, despite his promise to Noah. He’d stop by on Saturday. He’d tell the officer escorting him that he was bringing Noah a book, keeping a promise to a five-year-old boy, spreading the full deck out on the table so Dodds would stay off Benson’s back. “If it helps, it helps,” he told Cowan. “We’ll let a judge rule on admissibility, if it comes to that.”

“My boyfriend is an attorney with a regional accrediting agency, mostly for vocational colleges, but he’s in the loop about what goes on with the larger institutions. He didn’t know there was a connection between Hudson and what happened to me, because we’ve always had a policy never to talk shop.”

“Smart policy,” Barba said.

“Last week, my aunt and uncle said some incredibly stupid things about how many lives my attack saved, we couldn’t get them to stop talking, I was really losing it, they just _wouldn’t stop talking_ , almost to the point that I changed my mind about coming back to work. That night, I mentioned the Hudson connection to Tim, and he told me that Hudson had been in danger of losing their accreditation a few years ago, and they had a very, very suspicious transfer rate.”

Barba took out a legal pad and pen. “May I?” he asked.

“Go ahead. I think he told me all this because he wanted to make sure I went back to work, he knew it would be better for me. So, all right, Hudson’s transfer rate averages 50% of the freshman class every year, and 25% of the sophomore class. But their records, at least the ones they were willing to show the IRS and the accreditors, have them turning a profit. That’s extremely unusual for a private university. Here’s where it really gets into pillow talk: the reason I know all this is that I can’t stay asleep for more than 45 minutes, so we’ve been up all night talking about Hudson University.”

“You need to be careful,” Barba said, tugging at his own sleeve. “I’ve got a gash here that was meant for my heart.”

“NYPD’s got one guy in custody, I killed the other, how many hitmen can one university afford?”

“How do you think Hudson’s turning a profit?”

“With so much tuition loss, they shouldn’t be. Either the rules of math have changed in the 14 years since I aced the AP Calculus test, or Hudson is running a back-end diploma mill. Pay a few thousand dollars, get a real Hudson diploma without any of the work. Twenty thousand gets you a master’s degree. Tim’s seen it once before.”

Barba scribbled down everything she was telling him. “Good,” he said, “if this is an interstate operation, the feds will have them on another charge. Can I share this with Captain Eames?”

“Absolutely. I know I’m not supposed to think like this, but if Hudson hadn’t hired the hitman to kill the Muñozes — I’m sorry, they were your friends, I didn’t mean —“

“Belinda, it’s all right. Did Olivia Benson give you her card?”

“Her personal cell, actually..”

“She’s a good person to talk to.”

“I might call her.”

“I’ll pass this and your number on to Captain Eames,” he said, patting the legal pad.

“We’ll do whatever we can to help the case along.”

After Cowan went home for the day, Barba stayed in his office working, preparing opening statements until well after 8. Lucia texted to ask if he’d like to bring Benson and her son over for Christmas dinner. He didn’t answer.

Tonight, he said to himself as he opened a desk drawer, was the sort of night to indulge in his once-a-month, sometimes once-every-two-months, office scotch. 

The taxpayers would (rightly) panic if they knew how much office scotch was in that courthouse. 

He sauntered over to the window, staring down at the street as he sipped, chiding himself for his disgusting self-indulgence when people like Alex and Yelina, Belinda, Claire Kincaid, the whistleblower murdered at Hudson decades ago, who’d been victims of very real, very terrifying violence. He was mourning a romantic relationship that ended before it really got the chance to begin. _Selfish prick_ , he could hear a number of people saying, with some variation in language and terminology. 

He’d been here before. 

He’d been here when Yelina had told him they had to cool it until everything settled around them. 

That was something he hadn’t thought about in decades, literally decades, except that one afternoon in his office, when Alex was first embroiled in the original scandal that had brought down his mayoral campaign, when Yelina asked if SVU’s investigation was really about _them_. 

“About us,” she’d said.

He sipped the scotch until it burned his nasal passages.

Before the mayoral campaign, you could go to State Senator Alex Muñoz if you had a hole in your wall that your landlord wouldn’t fix and Alex would be on the senate floor and on television talking about the hole in your wall, how it was a symptom of landlord-tenant problems in New York City, until it was fixed. You could go to State Senator Muñoz if you’d gone to a $40,000 a year vocational school promising $100,000 a year salaries to graduates, had been in debt and underemployed for 5 years, and Alex would fight tooth and nail to get the school fined, to get student debt laws changed, all in your name. There was a disconnect, a canyon that couldn’t be bridged, between the corrupt, lecherous philanderer Muñoz and the uniquely dedicated political Muñoz. Barba imagined Alex reflected in the window, telling him to forget Benson for now and fight the good fight against Hudson. 

He imagined Kincaid too, half-joking that it had taken him long enough to figure out she’d been murdered, and what sort of failed mentor had she been if it had taken him twenty years? She’d turn serious then, maybe, and command him to get out there and change the statutes.

And Yelina. _Come on, Rafi, this was our ticket out of hell. Go after Hudson. And make sure what happened there never happens again. For us, Rafi. And for all the people who couldn’t come forward because New York told them it was too late._

Abuelita too, always, but he couldn’t bring himself to imagine her there, because the bar association had banned him from seeking an appointment to the bench, the very thing she’d invested all her hope in, the very thing he’d quietly invested most of his hopes in too. 

Here he found himself, a prosecutor in his mid-forties, known for his big brass ego, hunched over near the window, stifling already-silent sobs, clutching a tumbler of scotch.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still not sure how many more chapters ahead, but this won't drag on forever, I promise! Working on a Chapter 10 full of fluffernutter-angst-hurtcomfort-SO MUCH CRYING-and so on, then I just have to plot out the last "arc." Whew.
> 
> Anyway, read, comment, sit, drink, smile.

When Barba appeared before the Court of Appeals in Albany a week before Christmas, he and Benson hadn’t spoken in more than two weeks because he was a coward who couldn’t even bring himself to deliver a book to a kid and she, who no one in their right mind would ever call a coward, had chosen to avoid Barba rather than look into whether Dodds had overstepped his bounds in claiming that a relationship with the ADA would screw up the Hudson case and possibly compromise the entire DA’s office.

She knew Barba was upstate arguing his case, working to convince the judges that rape and sexual assault charges, in a few instances unlawful imprisonment, ought to be pressed against the three teachers who’d attacked more than 30 students over two decades, and the administration that worked tirelessly to cover those crimes up. That morning, she’d sent him a text: _You’ve got this._ He didn’t respond. She hadn’t expected him to. 

In the afternoon, Eames came down to the 16th precinct to update her on the federal side of the investigation, and to tell her that the federal attorneys planned to combine all the charges under RICO. “You can’t do that,” Benson protested. “The rape and sexual assault charges need to stay in Manhattan, or at least go to the Attorney General.”

“I told Dodds you’d say that,” Eames said, settling into a chair. “Dodds said, _go tell Benson I’m doing her a favor._ I didn’t think you’d like having the investigation taken away from you.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Is his “favor” a passive-aggressive punishment?”

“Depends whose side you’re on, Alex.”

“Changing the statute of limitations depends on the case staying with Manhattan.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I told Dodds and the federal attorney I work with. She said she’d be willing to let Barba sit second chair.”

“Doesn’t help us on the statutes.”

“I didn’t get this far by being stupid. This favor Dodds thinks he’s doing for you, it’s about breaking up the conflict of interest between you and Barba.”

“I broke that conflict of interest up myself two weeks ago. But this isn’t about that. You told me a few months ago that sexual assaults that happen within big federal cases get lost in the fray, under the bigger charges. You throw those in under RICO, that’s exactly what happens here. It means no justice for the original victims, no changes to the state statute that’d let victims seek justice later, when they’re ready. Please assure the federal attorneys and Dodds that justice for the victims is more important to me than any personal issues they may be imagining.”

Eames stood, resting her hand against the back of the chair. “All these rules of conduct, all these procedures, they were put in place to prevent sexual relationships from happening where there was unequal balance of power, like McCoy and his assistants way back when. That’s not you and Barba at all.”

“Let’s just get this Hudson case wrapped up, give Barba what he needs to try to get the statutes changed, get justice, take down Hudson, end of story.”

“I’ll tell Dodds how important it is for the sex crimes to be tried in your jurisdiction.”

“Important to the victims.”

“Right. I’m driving up to Massachusetts tomorrow — right near the Connecticut border — to talk to a former Hudson professor, Christine Fellowes. It’s a two and a half hour drive. You should come along.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

“She was the English professor who was in a relationship with the serial killer Nicole Wallace when Wallace was teaching there under an assumed identity. After Wallace murdered a dean and a graduate student, the entire English department resigned. We have some questions about what she and the other professors knew.”

“I see,” Benson said. “Tell me the truth about why you want me there and if Sergeant Tutuola can cover, I’ll go.”

Eames sat back down and leaned forward on the desk. “First, because it’ll really piss off Dodds,” Eames told her. “Second, Dr. Fellowes had been with the English department since the early 90s, so she’ll —“

“She’ll be more responsive is Serena Benson’s daughter is there.”

“Yes. I hope _that’s_ not overstepping.”

“You can catch me up on the whole story during the drive tomorrow.”

—-

In 2003, Nicole Wallace, who’d been teaching American literature at Hudson under the assumed identity of Elizabeth Hitchens, a British professor whom she’d murdered, seduced a graduate student in order to convince him to kill the university president and his assistant. Wallace had been angry that the president didn’t promote her actual romantic partner, Christine Fellowes. In the course of Major Case’s investigation, Wallace killed the graduate student as well. 

When Eames and Goren first met Wallace/Hitchens, she was teaching _Moby Dick_. She became Goren’s white whale.

Wallace was long dead — Goren’s former mentor had mailed him her heart, a story which led Benson and Eames to reflect that they’d collectively seen some of the most bizarre cases in the history of the NYPD, cases that sometimes made them question the reality they were living in — but what interested Eames in retrospect was the fact that the English department had hired “Elizabeth Hitchens” in the first place. Elizabeth Hitchens, the real one, was a published scholar of American literature. A funeral had been held for her in England. Her colleagues there had mourned her. How could Wallace have possibly passed a background check at Hudson?

Fellowes, a specialist in English modernism, had never heard of Hitchens. She felt that the university had put her in danger. Eames wondered if the university administrators had known exactly who Wallace was, if they’d brought her on so that she would kill the university’s president. 

A year ago, Benson and Eames would have both thought that sounded ridiculous, implausible. Now that they were taking Hudson down on RICO charges, it seemed more than likely. 

“This poor woman lived in fear for years,” Eames told Benson as they drove up Route 7, crossing northwards through Connecticut, “terrified Wallace would come after her. After Wallace was killed, she married someone out here. The wife died of a rare blood cancer last year. Such a tragedy. I hope whatever short time she had with her was good, joyous in some way, right?”

“Right,” Benson said, staring out the passenger window at the trees drifting by. 

“Don’t waste time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take it from someone who was widowed at 28, sometimes you need to focus on the big picture.”

“Take it from someone who’s seen victims get lost in the “big picture” —“

“I’m not talking about NYPD.”

“But you _are_.”

“I understand.”

“Regardless of whether or not Dodds is out of line — and believe me, if he is, the mayor will hear about it from me directly — there are policies, there are _mistakes_ that defense attorneys exploit. It’s happened to me before. I won’t let it happen again.”

They reached Fellowes’ split-level house just over the Massachusetts border before noon. When Eames introduced Benson, Fellowes got misty-eyed, a smile spreading across her face. “Like I wouldn’t recognize Olivia Benson,” she said. “When you were 21, you had a big pouf of curly hair, and your mom said you’d straightened it because you’d joined the police force.”

Benson laughed. “That’s right. She was furious.”

“Your mother,” Fellowes said with a sigh.

Benson hadn’t adequately prepared herself for how much she was going to have to think about her mother.

They sat down with Fellowes for coffee, and she told them the story of how the entire English department, tenured, untenured, and adjunct faculty alike, had resigned in protest of the university’s careless hire that had led to the death of the university president, his assistant, and a graduate student, and had endangered their beloved faculty member’s life. “We had long suspected something was very wrong with Hudson University,” Fellowes explained. “Olivia — can I call you Olivia? — back in the 90s, your mother was one of the first to bring up these issues at faculty meetings, but —“

_But she was a drunk_ , Benson wanted to say. “But no one believed her, because of her health problems,” was the better version that came out.

“In retrospect, a Cassandra.”

Benson looked over at Eames, who was staring into her coffee, her forehead wrinkled in concentration.

“I didn’t believe the stories either, until Elizabeth, until Nicole Wallace, I mean. And by then, Serena was long gone, and I was too overwhelmed — scared — to really reflect on anything. Your mother, Olivia, she kept all her notes, everything from her projects, her books in progress, she always talked about saving notes for posterity, for archivists.”

“She thought highly of herself,” Benson said. “No further comment on that, but she did.”

After they wrapped up their interview with Fellowes, they headed back to the car, where Benson offered to drive but Eames assured her she had no problem driving all the way back. “I’m all right,” Benson promised her. “It’s been years. There’s a safe deposit key somewhere, I’ll find it, turn the key over to you, let you go to the bank and look at whatever she had in there. We’ll follow procedure. If there’s evidence, it’ll stay clean.”

When they were inside the car, doors locked, Eames reached over and patted Benson’s arm. “Liv,” she said gently, “you realize that if your mother knew something, her accidental death may not have been accidental.”

Benson let out a quick “huh.”

“She could be my case’s fifth murder-for-hire.”

“We’ll see what she had in her notes, and go from there.”

She said nothing else until they were about to cross back into New York. “Liv?” Eames finally prompted.

“I’m trying to figure out how I missed this.”

“Don’t do that.”

“They called me at work, someone from the two-seven, I remember, told me she’d taken a header down the subway stairs on her way out of a bar, which made sense, given her … propensities. I shouldn’t have missed this.”

“Everyone, from the officers you spoke to that night down to the detectives on my team, missed it. Please don’t blame yourself.”

Serena Benson could be kind and loving one week, calculatingly emotionally abusive another week, vicious and physically abuse a few times a year. That fear, not knowing what would come next, not knowing what sort of week it was going to be, bubbled up inside her, irrationally, because Serena had been dead for 18 years. 

“I don’t,” Benson said. 

—-

The copy of _Ferdinand_ that Barba had promised Noah was still in a paper bag inside the top drawer of his desk. He’d bring it over before Christmas, he promised himself. Tonight, he was working. He’d lost the appeal.

The judges on the appeals court had praised Barba’s argument but told him that their hands were tied by the statute, which was written specifically to prevent adults over the age of 23 from pursuing their attackers in criminal court. Unlike most of the other statutes, there were no “ifs” or “ors” attached to this one. One of the appeals court judges told Barba he should make the same argument in front of the state senate. “That’s what Alex Muñoz was trying to do,” Barba said.

With the appeal in the toilet, he’d have to give everything else he had to the joint task force. Eames and the federal attorney heading up the case promised they’d bring Hudson down just like Barba had brought Optimum Airlines down. But without the change to the statute that Claire Kincaid and the Muñozes had been fighting for, the victory would be a hollow one. 

_Run for state senate_ , he imagined Alex saying.

_I’m not a politician._

_You’re a judge, Rafael. You were going to be a judge, I was going to be the mayor._

A truckload of bullshit, those dreams were. 

McCoy knocked on Barba’s half-open door. It was after 8. 

“Come in,” Barba said.

“Rafael.”

“I’m handing the rest of the case over to the joint task force.”

“Good. You’ve got a lot on your desk for the new year.”

“Four trials starting this January, now that Hudson is off the table.”

McCoy closed the door completely. “There’s been a new development in the case as of yesterday.”

“Will it help us change the statutes?”

“No. There may have been a fifth murder for hire.”

“Good for the task force.” He finally looked up from his work, squinting in McCoy’s direction. “Who?”

“Serena Benson.”

He felt his heart drop into his stomach. “Liv’s mother? She knew about the rapes?”

“We aren’t sure. She may have known something, though, and no one in her department believed her until almost three years after she died. The task force is looking through an old safe-deposit box.”

“Jack, this case isn’t ours anymore. Why are we still discussing it?”

“That’s right, it’s not our case anymore.”

“Are you here because you expect me to go running to comfort Olivia?” he said, simultaneously sarcastic, amused, and angry. 

“She’s off the case now too.”

“Her boss told her that _fraternizing_ with me would bring down the DAs office.”

“I am the DAs office, and I don’t agree.”

“You ever get around to indicting that ham sandwich, Jack?”

McCoy started for the door. “Just because I can indict a ham sandwich,” he said, leaning on the doorknob, “doesn’t mean I will.” 

After McCoy left, Barba grabbed his coat and Noah’s book and headed uptown.


	10. Chapter 10

He called first, from the street outside her building, not far from the spot where he’d stood, drunk, the night of Alex and Yelina’s funeral. For a moment he thought she might turn him away — for the sake of their jobs, for the sake of the DAs office — but she told him she’d buzz him in. On the phone, her voice sounded hoarse.

Benson answered the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt. “I, uh, kept promising Noah I’d bring him _Ferdinand_ , and —“ He took the book out of the bag and handed it to her. She locked the deadbolt behind her and set the book on the kitchen counter. “I’ll — I’ll get him something nice for Christmas, too.”

He was stammering. She’d been crying. Her eyes were dry but swollen and bloodshot. He hated seeing her like this. He hated that he understood, _empathized with_ some of what she must have been feeling.

“Noah’ll like that. He misses you already.”

“Liv.” He reached out a hand to touch her elbow. “McCoy told me about the break in the case, the new charge.”

“Don’t,” she said, “don’t, I can’t.”

When he moved to retreat, she took a quick step towards him and pressed her face into his shoulder, into his coat. She let out a sharp, unsettling whimper followed by a sob that was just as unsettling because although he’d seen tears well up in her eyes before, he’d never seen her cry. 

He wrapped both arms around her and pulled her closer. “I’m here,” he said, moving one arm up so he could stroke her hair with his fingers. “I’m here.”

The sounds coming from her throat — a whimper, a grunt, a sob — terrified him, made him want to hold her closer. “I’m here,” he repeated, wanting to add _I love you_ , not sure how she’d react to a renewed declaration of love. 

“I can’t,” she said into the thick material of his coat.

“It’s okay.”

She lifted her head. “I can’t.”

“Olivia, look at me.” He took her hand and brought it to his heart. “It’s not your fault, and you’re not responsible for anything she did.”

“But what was done _to_ her —“

“Is not about you. It’s another federal charge against Hudson.”

“And a case that’s now out of our hands.”

“Out of our hands,” he repeated. “Listen. You’ll be all right. 17 years ago, they left the decision to pull the plug on my father in my hands. To this day my mother says I kept him on life support for two weeks out of spite. I don’t want you to have to feel what I felt, that guilt when you have to mourn someone who treated you like shit, someone who you don’t want to mourn.”

“I can’t,” she said again, but this time she rested the side of her head against his shoulder and tugged at his lapels, adding, “Take off your coat, Rafa. Stay.”

He took off his coat and set it on a chair. “You want me to?”

“Always.” 

He leaned forward so their foreheads were touching, then kissed her lips lightly. “I know,” he said. “I know what it’s like to have a dark place in your heart that your job forces you to keep revisiting.”

“But we do our jobs because of those dark places, don’t we?”

“We do.”

“Our 30 victims, they’re getting lost in the federal case. We’re all avenging them by taking Hudson down, I think, I hope, but they can’t press charges.”

“I tried,” Barba said. “I’m still trying.” 

“Become a state senator. The one from our district is retiring after the next election. That’s what you can do. Fix the statutes by getting elected to the state senate.”

“Liv.”

“I’m serious. You should consider it.”

“I’m not a politician. Alex was the politician.”

“I’ve seen you in front of a grand jury. I’ve heard stories about your arguments in front of the Court of Appeals.”

“Well.”

“This time, their hands were tied. Someone needs to go into the state senate and tell them that “special interests” aren’t so special if they’re arguing to make it harder for victims to press charges. Whose “interests” does that serve?”

“Liv, honey, I’m not running for state senate. There are other ways.”

“If you say so.” She kissed him again, and for a few minutes, they stood just outside the kitchen, holding each other. “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.

“So am I.”

“I won’t let the brass scare me off again.”

“And I,” he said, nuzzling his face into her neck, “will keep looking for a job with the Attorney General.”

There was a creak in the hardwood floor behind them. “Mom?”

They quickly broke apart and saw Noah standing near the counter, half-asleep, his hair a mess. 

Benson’s eyes widened, as if she was trying to will all the tears back into them. “Sweet boy, did we wake you?”

Confused, he wrinkled his forehead and threw his arms around Benson. 

Now Barba found himself choking up too, at the sight of the little boy comforting his mother. Great.

Benson stood, taking Noah with her. Barba was surprised that her back didn’t buckle as she lifted the 5-year-old. 

“Uncle Rafa brought you a copy of the book the little girl in the diner was reading.”

“ _Ferdinand_. The bull.”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

“Yes, but only tonight.” She mouthed _sorry_ in Barba’s direction. 

“Can Uncle Rafa read me the book?”

“It’s late. Uncle Rafa has work in the morning and you have school.”

“I’ll call out,” Barba said. “I have personal time I’ll lose by the end of the year.”

“Sure, spoil him,” Benson said, now cracking a smile. “Come on.”

Barba followed her into the bedroom, where she set Noah down on the bed. Noah climbed under the covers with his mother, and Barba sat tentatively near the edge and started reading. 

Five pages in, Noah was asleep.

Barba crossed over to the other side of the bed and kissed Benson’s cheek, under her eyes, where deep pockets had settled in from the stresses of the last 48 hours. “I’ll sleep on your couch,” he whispered. “I’m here if you need me.”

She grabbed his hand. “Thank you.”

—- 

When he woke up a little before sunrise, Benson was already awake, pacing the kitchen in a bathrobe, a cup of coffee in her hand. Her hair was wet. “You’re going to work today?” Barba asked.

“I haven’t decided yet.” She stopped what she was doing and went over to him. He threw off the blanket and slipped on his suit pants from the night before. As he was buckling his belt, Benson kissed him, deep, desperate, slow, lovely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Tucker was an ass sometimes. He wine-shamed me.”

“What?” Barba said, unable to suppress a smirk.

“We were celebrating a win once, and I ordered a second glass of wine, and he gave me a minute-long speech of serious concern for wanting to celebrate with a second glass of wine. That’s when I should have known.”

“Not to defend the guy, but he was probably —“

“I was afraid to drink for a month. I had this horrible fear that I was turning into my mother, and I dumped a bottle of cabernet down the drain. Good cabernet. I was so shaken up about it that I mentioned it to Dr. Lindstrom. Something about what I was doing felt wrong, and Lindstrom reminded me that my mother drank 6 to 7 glasses a day before she moved on to vodka, and that if I ever found myself drinking, say, more than a glass a day on a regular basis I might be concerned, but I never brought it up with Tucker because he didn’t get that people’s minds and people’s — their —“

“Traumas,” Barba suggested.

“ _Traumas_ aren’t as simple as he thinks. I’m sorry, Rafa.”

“I forgive you. Are you taking the day?”

“Yes. Besides, I think Dodds, even Eames, would rather have me off duty for a couple of days while they’re looking through my mother’s safe deposit box.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Better than last night. After I take Noah to school, I’m going to spend at least three hours in bed, getting myself back together before I work a million shifts between Christmas and New Year’s. Care to join me?”

“In bed or in your millions of shifts at work?”

“Bed, of course.”

He kissed a spot behind her ear. “I’ll be waiting.”

“I like that.”

“Tell me what else you like,” he said, his lips on her ear.

“I think you should put your suit back on.” 

He raised an eyebrow. “The whole suit?”

“Those suspenders, I don’t know what it is — the vest, the tie —“

“You only love me for my precisely-tailored three piece suits.”

She kissed the fake pout off his lips. “Your suits turn me on. I love you for your dedication and your kindness.”

He tilted his head. “You had to ruin the moment.”

“You are dedicated, kind, and I want to hold on to those suspenders while you fuck me, dry cleaner bills be damned,” she whispered. 

“That’s better.”

“You’ll have to wait an hour while I get the kid ready and walk him to school, okay?”

“Okay. I love you.”

With a hand in his hair, she looked into his eyes. “I love you. And I promise not to —“

He cut her off with a kiss. “Don’t make promises. Let’s enjoy what we’ve got for now.”


	11. Chapter 11

Ten counts obstruction of justice. 

Five counts murder for hire: the original whistleblower from 30-something years ago, Claire Kincaid, Alex Muñoz, Yelina Muñoz, and Serena Benson.

Forty more counts on various conspiracy charges.

One count, only one count, conspiracy to cover up the sexual assault of a minor, on the single charge the Manhattan DA’s office had even been able to file against a Hudson High School teacher, from the case that Kincaid and Barba had prosecuted in 1996.

Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty — music to Barba’s ears as he sat second chair for the federal trial against 18 people who’d worked in the Hudson University provost’s office. 

The Attorney General had already filed fraud charges against a number of Hudson offices for running a back-end diploma mill. 

Their takedown of Hudson University was succeeding on an even larger scale than Barba’s takedown of Optimum the year before, but it was a hollow victory: the Manhattan DA or the New York Attorney General needed to file at least 32 sexual assault of a minor charges, and then add those to the conspiracy charges against the Hudson provost, but they couldn’t because that goddamn statute of limitations was in their way.

The day after the feds won their case, Barba was back in his office. McCoy came in with a stack of papers that afternoon. 

“I’ve done you the favor of printing out the petition that’s the first step in running for state senate. My friend Val Casiano is a former Nassau County ADA who runs an organization to help get fresh, special-interest-free candidates into state elections. She would be happy to serve as your campaign manager and get a couple of fundraisers organized.”

“Jack,” Barba warned.

“After Lieutenant Benson takes the captain exam, that is. I’ve signed my name, but in the second spot, so that Olivia can have the first.”

“I’m not running for state senate.”

“Val says you only need 500 signatures to file, but if you want the Democratic nomination, you’ll need to aim for at least 5,000.”

Barba leaned back in his chair. “Fifty percent of people in this district will say “that’s the guy who brought down Alex Muñoz.” Twenty-five percent will say “that guy was that lecherous creep Muñoz’s best friend.” Ten to fifteen percent will say “that’s the ADA who paid off a witness, he must be just as corrupt as all of the other politicians.””

“This case you’re arguing here has no merit,” McCoy said.

“Add to that the fact that I’m a Cuban American who was at one point in a 4-and-change-year relationship with a local democratic finance chairman, and that takes out a good portion of the baby boomers in the outer boroughs.”

McCoy patted the stack of papers he’d dropped on Barba’s desk. “I did this for you because it’s what Claire would have done.”

Barba let out a quick laugh, reflexively running his tongue over his back teeth as he imagined Kincaid in his office with the same petition. “She’d have rolled her eyes and said, “Come on, Raf, you can’t hold on to that dream of a judicial appointment forever. You want a way to change the law, here it is.” No nonsense.”

“None about her, ever.”

“This is all because Claire wanted that statute changed, isn’t it?”

“In part, yes.”

“Give me a few days,” Barba said. “Liv takes her exam on Saturday.”

That night, Barba told Benson about the petition after she’d finished studying, when she finally came to bed around 11:30. “Do it,” Benson said, and he could see her grinning in the dark.

“I gave you all my reasons months ago, when you made the same suggestion.”

“Do it.”

“I’ll tell you what. If you pass the captain’s exam with the highest score for this test administration, I will run for state senate.”

—

Benson passed the exam with the second highest score. “Deal’s off,” Barba joked as they cleaned up that night in April. After she’d learned about her high pass, Noah insisted they celebrate with cake, because Noah insisted that they celebrate everything with cake, so Benson invited her senior squad over to indulge in cake (and Cabernet, for the adults). 

“We’re gonna lose you, aren’t we?” Rollins had lamented.

“Probably not until late fall,” Benson said. Part of her didn’t want to leave her post at SVU, she told Barba after everyone had left. 

“Alternate deal,” Barba said. “Let me file my candidacy using this address, and I’ll run.”

“This will screw up your commute.”

“I mean it,” he said, reaching out to draw her into an embrace. “If I make any money on selling my apartment, anything more than what’s left of my mortgage, it’ll go towards Noah’s Harvard fund.”

“I accept. But, Harvard, specifically?”

“Yes. I’m starting a … tradition.”

“A family tradition?”

“Yes,” he said with a crooked smile.

He was thinking of his grandmother.

—-

Barba’s first fundraiser, on a Saturday night in August at a restaurant in Lower Manhattan, was marked by a brief power outage caused by an intense thunderstorm that took down a power line, throwing the restaurant into darkness in the middle of his speech. He waited out the darkness, and, fifteen minutes later, continued with his speech. 

After the fundraiser wrapped up around 10, Barba and Benson went for a walk, him in dress shoes and a black tux, the bowtie removed and the top three buttons of his white shirt undone, her in the scoop-neck green dress she hardly ever had the chance to wear, her heels tucked away in her purse, flats on her feet. The air had cooled considerably; the day’s humidity had lost its bite, and a light breeze blew across Centre Street as they found themselves in front of the courthouse.

Benson linked her arm with his. “You all right?” she asked. “You made it through your first campaign speech.”

“Tougher audience than a trial jury,” he said, turning to smile at her, reflecting for half a second on the sliver of luck he’d been granted to have Captain Olivia Benson here with him tonight, every night. “But the real campaign speeches will be in front of people who don’t go to $100-a-plate fundraising dinners.”

She patted his arm, and together, they looked up at the frieze above the steps. “”Did McCoy ever tell you the story —“ she started to say.

“At least seven hundred times.”

“It must be his favorite one to tell.”

“A misquote of George Washington, set in stone, and there’s nothing they can do to change it. McCoy forgets he’s already told everyone in New York about it at least once.”

“A little sad, though. It’s only one small word.”

“One wrong word, and it’ll be there forever.”

At the foot of the steps, he placed his hands on Benson’s hips and kissed her. “I might be on the state senate next year,” he said, a nervous laugh coming from his throat, a little bit of hope shining, maybe, behind his eyes.

Rafael Barba would never be a judge: that was monumentalized in a concrete frieze somewhere, like the architect’s mistake in the facade of the otherwise well-designed courthouse. But what he had — Liv, Noah, this new avenue where he could pursue that little bit of justice that the Muñozes and Kincaid had fought so hard for — what he had was good enough, always good enough.


End file.
